History and Complexity ...

by Cliopatria

Caleb at Mode for Caleb picks up on the discussion between Tim Burke and KC Johnson on"The Fortunes of Political History". Says Caleb:

Rather than asking"how we best know the past" in toto, the real question that every historian has to ask is how to best answer a particular historical problem. What we study depends on what we want to know. For some questions about the past, studying"everyday life" is essential; for other questions, the"actions of powerful individuals" must be examined.
As in any academic enterprise, historians have to be selective in their methods, but always with an appreciation that other methods are equally viable for other problems. Which problems are in most urgent need of solving is another question, and Burke is right to suggest that we need less finger-pointing and more serious discussion of this issue. But even if we were to ask this meta-question, we would not avoid selective emphasis. The past is too complex, its subject matter too vast, for us to ever believe that we have found the most important segment of it. I was originally attracted to history because historians seem to realize this, and their transparency about the necessary selectivity of intellectual life helps remind us that life itself is irreducibly complex, and that understanding it fully will always elude our grasp. We can say of history what John Dewey argued of philosophy--that when we selectively emphasize something,"there is no idea of denying what is left out, for what is omitted is merely that which is not relevant to the particular problem at hand."
Of course, Dewey went on to say ... that"in philosophies, this limiting condition is often wholly ignored. It is not noted and remembered that the favored subject-matter is chosen for a purpose and that what is left out is just as real and important in its own characteristic context." The same, alas, is often true in histories. Bravo to Burke for reminding historians not to forget that emphasis is always selective.

I'm inclined to be the skeptic wherever John Dewey is philosopher/king. KC's point, I think, would be that if the conversation is without constitutional/diplomatic/political historians, as the conversations at Michigan have increasingly become, the constitutional/diplomatic/political questions may be left out -- not because they are irrelevant or even because the conversationalists would not acknowledge the relevance if the question came up -- but simply because no one is there who is likely to raise them.

Having said that, one of KC's other claims, that departmental hires should be held to the highest standards of merit, comes into play here, as well. I've just finished reading A Murder in Virginia by Suzanne Lebsock of Rutgers. It is about the murder of a white Southside Virginia farmer's wife in 1896. If Lebsock were checking off those little field boxes at the University of Michigan, I'm sure that she'd be coded as one of those historians of gender and ethnic studies. But, lord, the range of material she covers, the range of questions she asks of it, and the skill with which she marshals difficult evidence is just astonishing. In her skillful hands, questions arising from agricultural history, legal history, and political history are raised as forcefully and tellingly as issues arising from concerns about gender and ethnicity.

I cite Lebsock as an example of a historian who transcends the little field boxes and skillfully probes the issues from many perspectives. In the process, she convinced me that her little murder case occurred at a critical moment in Southern political history and that we learn a great deal by simply teasing out the connections and implications for a whole variety of subjects. That's where I think Tim's argument for the historian as generalist is most persuasive. When you see the best of them at work, it is awesome.

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Jonathan Rees - 8/3/2004

Two points, one old and one new:

1. Michigan, Missouri, Brooklyn, Williams, Illinois. What's missing from this analysis? Only most of the profession.

2. It may be rare that a department only looks for a "US historian," but it is very common to pick US historians by time period rather than by field of specialty. I, for one, applied for many 1877-1945 jobs not too long ago. Tracks specified as 1945 - Present were (and I suspect still) also very common.

Jonathan Rees

Robert KC Johnson - 8/3/2004

A few points here. The figures that I have used throughout have not taken into account (at any institution) anything but the national period, largely because (with very rare exceptions) History departments do not hire in "colonial political" or "Revolutionary social" history--either now or in the past. Pauline Maier, Lance Banning, and Gordon Wood have made the case that the concerns I have for the national period also apply to the Revolutionary period, and I'm perfectly willing to defer to their judgment on the issue.

Second, for the characterizations of research interests, I'm simply using those supplied by the professors themselves--so if anyone's been intellectually dishonest, it's the professors. On my website, I describe myself as a political, diplomatic, and constitutional historian. I'm willing to give others the professional courtesy of accurately describing their intellectual interests. It seems to me rather a stretch to describe people as "political" historians when even they don't describe themselves that way. I don't mean(!) to pick on Michigan, except to view it as the most extreme manifestation of a broad field.

Third, I agree completely that it's quite possible for someone to be a specialist in African-Am and constitutional history; or, say, gender and diplomatic history. Other departments have taken advantage of this--at Missouri and Illinois, lines for legal and diplomatic positions went exclusively to people in the respective fields who did Afr-Am (mo) and gender (ill). I'm not saying that in these cases, MO and ILL didn't hire the best people in the pool--quite possibly they did. My guess, however, is that if the only African-American historian at MO was a specialist in the Supreme Court when the department had three or four other legal historians; or the only women's history at ILL was someone who had, say, just finished a biogprahy of Pat Schroeder's career on the Armed Services Committee when the department had a few other straight diplomatic historians, people would raise their eyebrows.

Fourth, like Tim, I don't want to say I oppose generalists. I was hired to teach diplomatic history at Williams, but also did courses in political and legal history; at Brooklyn, I was hired to teach political history (this was under a previous president and provost, before the hiring of those who worked on "figures in power" was prohibited), but also have developed courses in diplomatic, transnational, and constitutional history. Any good professor nowadays, except at the very elite schools, has to be a generalist. That said, 80-90 percent of the tenure-track hires occur at the ass't prof level, and, at least with regard to US history, it's rare that departments ask solely for "US Historian," without any mention somewhere in the ad of subfields.

David Lion Salmanson - 8/3/2004

It's a tough call and probably incorrect to say 10 percent of the departments resources are devoted to African-American history. Some of the folks listed on the website as being interested in African-American history are courtesy appointments from other departments. Julius Scott uses the term but as a Carribeanist with a broad definition as to what counts as "American."

Let's look at this a little closer. The Americanists in the department break down into four or five broad groups. First you have the Southern historians primarily represented by Mills Thornton (methodology political) and Lassiter (methodology political). Next you have the western historians primarily Montoya and Deloria. Next you have the biggest group the Atlantic World/Colonialists. Now many of the African-Americanists are in this group but it also includes folks like Gregory Dowd a diplomatic historian who happens to study European-Native American colonial era diplomacy an important topic not usually covered in diplomatic history and very fertile ground for lots of research. Also David Hancock is in here with his economic histories of trans-Atlantic trade. We can also include John Dann, Carol Karlsen, and Sue Juster in this group. Comparative colonial is quite strong at Michigan so this correlates well with their other areas in Latin America, South Asia and Africa all of whom have people that work on the comparative colonial experience in ways similar to that of the Americanists. Next is the intellectual historians. Generally considered a "traditional" field it is quite healthy at Michigan. Finally there are the outliers who don't fit any of these categories.

We also aren't looking at undergraduate teaching where two military historians are doing a fair amount of teaching in non-tenure track positions. Both of these guys teach big courses and have lots of undergraduate contact hours even if they don't publish. They are making contacts and sending undergrads to other places for grad work in military history.

Finally let's look at hiring. Michigan's most productive advisors in terms of number of graduate students placed by current faculty have been in political history and Southern history (that Mills guy trains them good!). I am not counting Earl Lewis' or Robin Kelley's students as both are gone and their replacements haven't had time to shepherd a crop through yet.

And I still don't understand how an institutionally weak place like Michigan has come to represent all academic trends! For all the talk of it's vaunted Diplomatic History tradition, it really amounts to one guy at a time, same as now. And when I had my original idea for a dissertation - it would have been under Brad Perkins - he thought it was precisely where the field was going. Of course, Richard White beat me to it with Middle Ground and Dowd's work is very much in that same vein.

Timothy James Burke - 8/3/2004

But again, this is about strategic decisions to specialize in particular areas in order to attract grad students. David may be right that Michigan is increasingly hard-put to maintain its strengths in all areas, which would make strategic decisions all the more important.

So at this point, suppose you had a bright undergraduate who wanted to study African-American history. Where are you going to send him/her? Michigan would have to be one of the two or three places you'd think about. That's what this kind of strategic choice does for you as a program seeking to attract the best graduate students.

Now could you move some of those resources elsewhere and still maintain your strategic advantage? Maybe. Depends on what other departments at other institutions choose to do, in part. But such moves are fraught with peril: you may lose your reputation in one area without gaining it in another. Moreover, trying to make such a shift too abruptly almost certainly gets you into the problematic area of many "star hires" in a short timeframe. As Duke's famous Department of English demonstrated back in its glory days, such an approach bears fruit for a while, but often leads to a big implosion somewhere down the line.

But also we should keep in mind that abstract decisions about where to invest faculty tend to come up hard against the strongly path-dependent reality of those choices. When you choose to specialize, you may be making that choice for a very long time. You can't just shift three positions over at will--it's very dependent on whether the people inhabiting those positions are close to retirement or considering a move elsewhere, and when there is an area of established strength in a program, it's also very rare for the people representing that strength to voluntarily agree that resources should be shifted elsewhere.

I might also note that it is not entirely impossible for someone specializing in African-American history to also be a political or constitutional historian. (I could even imagine a specialist in African-American history also being a diplomatic specialist, but I agree that's a more unlikely combination). We're taking these things as contradictory when they aren't necessarily so.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/3/2004

Sorry to offend you, David, but the numbers do reflect what is up on the history department's site at Michigan. Wouldn't you agree that the department is over-invested in African-American history? That's not 10% of American history resources. It's 10% of all history resources are invested in African-American history.

David Lion Salmanson - 8/3/2004

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the use of KCs numbers is intellectually dishonest. Repeating them is the equivalent of the Fox effect on news. A closer look at the department and the work its members actually do shows a shift toward regional history in the last several years. At the time I received a graduate award for Western History there was only one Western historian on staff and she was a new hire. Now there are several. Further, attempts at making political hires fell through as several senior scholars turned down rather lucrative offers and others were poached by schools (usually private) who could pay more. Michigan has a rule that you can only have one outside offer matched at each level of professor. So somebody like David Hollinger became impossible to keep after his kids graduated from high school. In effect, Michigan has to counterprogram against what is going on in the Ivies and Stanford (and to a lesser extent Berkely NYU and other geographically desirable schools) to maintain any sort of stability. HIstorically, one advantage that Michigan offered that offset the lower pay was lower cost of living in Ann Arbor and excellent public schools. Both went out the window in the last 10 years.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/3/2004

I agree with you that, at the graduate level and at major research institutions, especially, hiring is likely to be in specializations and, even, perhaps it should be. By my count, there are 101 full time slots in history at the University of Michigan. By KC's count, there are seven or eight people in women's history and eleven people in African-American history. The department boasts of being ranked #5 among graduate programs in history by U. S. News and World Report and of being #1 in African American history and #2 in women's history. Just on the face of things, it's fairly clear that some person or persons at high levels of authority at Michigan decided that the history department would concentrate resources in African-American and women's history. But, really, does it take 10% of such a large department's resources to rank #1 in African American history? Maybe it does, especially if a) there is not a really outstanding name among them and b) several of those people are historians of limited accomplishment. All of this is accomplished, as KC and Tom Bruscino have pointed out, at the cost of not replacing distinguished American military, political and diplomatic historians. It is just astonishing that the department has not determined to create another area of strength, taken three of those slots and hired three distinguished mainstream American political historians, with credentials and visibility in constitutional, diplomatic, and military history, where Michigan has had such strength in the past.

Timothy James Burke - 8/3/2004

Actually, this is one discussion where I'm not arguing for historian-as-generalist. I do think that major research universities that train graduate students are going to be organized around specializations for the time being, and that's ok. In this particular discussion, I'm simply suggesting to KC that you can't make a purely inclusionary argument for political or diplomatic or constitutional history--that every single argument on behalf of a specialization is going to have to be really forthright and lay its cards on the table. You have to say why your specialization outweighs others. And I do think that it's possible to make such a case, even though I know it's a delicate thing to do both personally and professionally.