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The Imprint of the Present on the Past

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The Imprint of the Present on the Past NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMA' The imprint of the The The Hyde Collection present on the past Editor's Contents Notes The New History of the Enlightenment by Robert Anchor History is frequently as reflective of How new approaches to new subjects evoke the sense of process in an era. the present as it is of the past; histo­ rians necessarily draw on the meth­ Hume and the Whig Historians: ods, the subjects, and the theories of The place of social conditions in Hume's studies of government. their own age in their attempts to recreate an earlier one. The three The Arrival of Women in Medieval History by Suzanne Fonay Wemple historians writing in this issue of A review of the scholarship reconstructing the female experience. Humanities show that this imprint of the present is not necessarily a dis­ The promise of a Place in History: The oral history of modern Iran. tortion of the past, but rather a fo­ cusing device, which makes distant How To Write a Murder History issues and events more visible. L'affaire Caillaux set on the stage of World War I. Intellectual historian Robert An­ chor of the University of California, Remembering Andrew Jackson by Harry L. Watson Santa Cruz, discusses the ways in Old Hickory's fluctuating fortunes hold a lesson for historians. which the new history has enriched the understanding of the Enlighten­ The Transformation of Philadelphia ment through emphasizing the Collaborative studies of the emergence of an industrial giant. "synchronic, structural dimensions" of the period. Medieval historian The Old Frontier: Frederick Jackson Turner and U.S. historiography. Suzanne Fonay Wemple of Barnard College discusses recent scholarship From Negative to Positive Images: Saving photos of the Southwest. on the relatively new subject of women in the Middle Ages and sug­ Bringing the Past up to Date: Teaching the teachers of teachers. gests the topics remaining to be ex­ plored before a history can be writ­ Interpretations of History ten that will integrate women's High school teachers study "fundamental changes in historical outlook." experiences into the general history of the time. Finally, political histo­ What I Read on My Summer Vacation rian Harry L. Watson of the Univer­ At St. John's College, the best way to teach is to learn. sity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, traces the changing interpretations What Americans Should Know: Western civilization or world history? of the Jacksonian presidency through five periods of American The Humanities GUIDE: Funds for Faculty Study historiography and demonstrates that "each major group of revision­ ists has discovered some important and enduring insight that subse­ Humanities quent scholars have been forced to include in their accounts." A bimonthly review published by the The opinions and conclusions expressed in National Endowment for the Humanities are those of the authors and do How scholars interpret history will Humanities not necessarily reflect Endowment policy. matter little, however, if they disre­ Material appearing in this publication may be Chairman: Lynne V. Cheney freely reproduced with appropriate credit to gard the widespread ignorance of Director of Public Affairs: Humanities. The editor would appreciate cop­ the past among American youth, ev­ Susan H. Metts ies for the Endowment's reference. The chair­ idenced by the preliminary findings Assistant Director for Publications: man of the Endowment has determined that of a survey being conducted by the Caroline Taylor the publication of this periodical is necessary in the transaction of the public business re­ National Assessment of Educational Editor: Linda Blanken quired by law of this agency. Use of funds for Progress. Humanities also describes Managing Editor: Mary T. Chunko printing this periodical has been approved by some of the efforts now underway Editorial Board: Marjorie Berlincourt, the director of the Office of Management and to correct this deficiency so that his­ James Blessing, Harold Cannon, Budget through September 1988. Send re­ quests for subscriptions and other communi­ tory may continue to inform the Richard Ekman, Donald Gibson, cations to the editor, Humanities, National Guinevere Griest, Pamela Glenn Endowment for the Humanities, 1100 future. Menke Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, —Linda Blanken D C. 20506. Telephone 202/ 786-0435. (USPS Designed by Maria Josephy Schoolman 521-090) ISSN 0018-7526. The New History of the Enlightenment Cooperation and exchange among questions asked by the new histori­ ceived as well to be crises of the En­ A schematic top history, the social sciences, and ans are those that preoccupy all of lightenment tradition. It is not sur­ view of a roller other fields in the humanities have us nowadays: the nature of power, prising, therefore, that much of the in a machine to become routine in recent years and authority, and leadership; the rela­ best contemporary thought takes the form wrought- have contributed significantly to the tionship of political institutions to form of an attack upon or defence of iron rods, front Diderot's interdisciplinary and international underlying social patterns and value the original Enlightenment. In re­ L'Encyclopedie. character of contemporary historical systems; attitudes toward gender, cent decades, many thinkers have scholarship. New models, methods, class, and race; sexuality, marriage, come to believe that there were seri­ and fields of research, which were and family; work, leisure, and con­ ous flaws in the Enlightenment faith nonexistent or only in their infancy sumption; wealth, status, and privi­ in reason, science, education, and forty years ago, have proliferated at lege; law, crime, and punishment; the perfectibility of the human spe­ an amazing pace since the Second the relationship of religion, science, cies. We need only think of such im­ World War, and more particularly and magic as explanatory models of portant works as Theodor Adorno since the mid-1960s. Quantitative reality; the impact on people's lives and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of history and psychohistory, women's and ways of looking at the world of Enlightenment (1947), Michel history and history of the family, literacy and education; the strength Foucault's Madness and Civilization: A ethnic and oral history, history of and meaning of ritual, symbol, and History of Insanity in the Age of Reason popular culture and technology, an­ custom as ways of sustaining com­ (1961), and Jean Francois Lyotard's thropology and critical theory, lin­ munity; patterns of social resistance The Postmodern Condition: A Report on guistics and discourse analysis—all and obedience; and the shifting eco­ Knowledge (1979). Given the central have generated new historiograph­ logical balance between man and place occupied by the Enlighten­ ical strategies and practices which nature. ment in current thinking about the have dramatically altered historians' These new trends are trans­ future of Westem and world civiliza­ sense of the past. Because of these forming virtually every field of his­ tion, it is not surprising that our un­ and other developments, the new torical study, including the Enlight­ derstanding of that tradition should history is more innovative and self- enment. Indeed, the Enlightenment be permeated by our perceptions of critical than the old; more demo­ is of particular interest to the new the present. cratic and less "elitist"; more global historians in that it offered the first A few of the main areas of activ­ and less Eurocentric; more preoccu­ program in the history of mankind ity, which characterize the new his­ pied with the potential of history to for the construction of an ideal soci­ tory of the Enlightenment and dis­ be, in Habermasian language, an ety based entirely on secular materi­ tinguish it from the old, are those "emancipatory" discipline; and more als—a program that established it­ pioneered principally by the Annales sophisticated about the complex re­ self, during and after the French school of historians. One such area lationships between theoretical- Revolution, as the characteristic is the study of the functions, compo­ methodological and political- world view of the Western world. It sition, and organization of a whole ideological considerations in actual was with Enlightenment values— array of institutions below the level research. Indeed, it would not be encapsulated in the revolutionary of those of the nation state: institu­ rash to speak of a fundamental slogan "Liberty, Equality, Frater­ tions regulating the production and reorientation of historical studies, nity" and reconstituted in the nine­ distribution of wealth, power, and which became apparent around the teenth century as "liberalism"— that status, such as the business and pro­ mid-1960s, and which suggests the Western mankind entered the twen­ fessional classes; institutions for so­ impact of the present in interpreting tieth century to face the challenges cialization and education, such as the past. of mass society and technological the family, the school, and the uni­ Significant changes of this kind do culture. Thus, the crises experienced versity; institutions for social con­ not, after all, occur in a vacuum. The in the twentieth century were per­ trol, such as the police, prisons, and the Enlightenment. His Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) was one of the first studies to bridge the gap between the intellectual Enlightenment and what he calls the popular Enlighten­ ment. In The Business of Enlighten­ ment (1979) and The Literary Under­ ground of the Old Regime (1982), Darnton broke new ground by ap­ plying statistical procedures and an­ thropological models to trace the dissemination of the Encyclopedia and other clandestine literature and their effects on various sectors of the French reading public. And in his most recent work, The Great Cat Mas­ sacre and Other Episodes in French Cul­ tural History (1984), Darnton used similar techniques to explore such diverse topics as peasant folklore, workers' revolts, the bourgeois men­ tality, police files, and popular adaptations of Enlightenment ideas.
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