Program on American Citizenship History in the age of fracture By Wilfred M. McClay June 2015 KEY POINTS . The discipline of history is in serious decline, as both practitioners and the public lack confidence that it can be a truth-seeking enterprise or provide a coherent account of the past. The so-called “age of fracture” in our current culture means that the broad commonalities of shared history are becoming less important than individual experience. To overcome its current decline, history must address the public’s common past and future in a way meant to contribute to a healthy foundation for our common civic existence. uiuiuii ike so many of the disciplines making up much on the belief that the road we have traveled L the humanities, the field of history has for to date offers us only a parade of negative some time been experiencing a slow examples of oppression, error, and dissolution, a decline that may be approaching a obsolescence—proof positive that the past has no critical juncture. Students of academic life lessons applicable to our unprecedented age. express this decline quantitatively, citing This loss of faith in the central importance of shrinking enrollments in history courses, the history pervades all of American society. Gone are disappearance of required history courses in the days when widely shared narratives about the university curricula, and the loss of tenurable past provided a sense of civilizational unity and faculty positions in all history-related areas.1 forward propulsion. Instead, we live, argues But even more disturbing indications of history’s historian Daniel T. Rodgers, in a querulous “age troubled status are harder to measure but of fracture” in which all narratives are contested impossible to ignore. One senses a loss of self- and the various disciplines no longer take a broad confidence, a fear that the study of the past may view of the human condition, rarely speak to one no longer be valuable or important and that another, and have abandoned the search for history itself lacks the capacity to be a coherent common ground in favor of focusing on the and truth-seeking enterprise, producing genuine concerns and perspectives of ever-more-minute knowledge that helps us locate ourselves in the subdisciplines, smaller groups, more finely tuned broad expanses of space and time. Some of this and exclusive categories of experience.2 This is derives from the growing vocationalism in not just a feature of academic life but seems to be American higher education, flowing from a desire an emerging feature of American life more that a college degree should lead reliably to generally. The broad and embracing gainful employment. But the fear rests just as commonalities of old are no more, undermined AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 1 and fragmented into a thousand subcultural preconceptions. But such works are at least being pieces. read by a public that is still hungry for history. This condition has profound implications for the Not content with this state of affairs, Bender academy and our society. The loss of history, not urges that we remember the example of certain only as a body of knowledge but also as a professional historians—the Progressive distinctive way of thinking about the world, will historians, such as Vernon Louis Parrington, have dire effects on the quality of our civic life. It Charles Beard, and Frederick Jackson Turner, or would be ironic if the great advances in a more recent one like the great Yale colonialist professional historical writing that we have seen Edmund Morgan—who were able to write for all in the past century or so—advances that have, kinds of audiences. He ends his article with a plea through the exploitation of fresh data and new for “synthetic histories” that somehow square the techniques of analysis, opened to us a more circle of subdisciplinary intensity and grand expansive but also a more detailed understanding narrative sweep, managing to enrich the latter of countless formerly hidden aspects of the past— with no loss of the former. But his examples are came at the expense of a more general audience less than convincing, since the Progressive for history, and for the resultant valuable effects historians were committed to a rather simplistic upon our public life. and highly political view of American history, as a constant conflict between the progressive forces This would be ironic, but it appears to be true. As of light and the regressive powers of darkness, a New York University historian Thomas Bender view that few professional historians today would laments in a recent article, gloomily entitled countenance.5 “How Historians Lost Their Public,” the growth of knowledge in ever-more-numerous and tightly focused subspecialties of history has resulted in the replacement of the old-fashioned survey The loss of a public course in colleges and universities—with its audience for history expansive scale, synthesizing panache, and virtuoso instructors—with more narrowly focused may be due to the loss courses confined to the research specialty of the professor.3 of a history for the Bender is loath to give up any of the advances public, a neglect of made by the profession’s ever-more-intensive history’s fundamentally form of historical cultivation, but he concedes that something has gone wrong: historians have public meaning. lost the ability to speak to, and command the attention of, a larger audience, even a well- educated one, that is seeking more general It is worth noting that Bender is not the first to meaning in the study of the past. They have make such a plea for synthesis. As Harvard indeed lost their public. They have had to cede historian Bernard Bailyn remarked in his 1981 much of their field to journalists, who know how presidential address to the American Historical to write much more accessibly and are willing to Association: “The greatest challenge that will face address themes—journalist Tom Brokaw’s historians in the years ahead, it seems to me, is … celebration of the “greatest generation” for how to put the story together again, now with a example—that strike a chord with the public but complexity and an analytic dimension never that professional historians have been trained to envisioned before; how to draw together the disdain as ethnocentric, triumphalist, or information available (quantitative and uncritically celebratory.4 Professional historians qualitative, statistical and literary, visual and complain that such material lacks nuance and oral) into readable accounts of major rigor and is prone to repackage the past in terms developments.”6 This is another call for the that readers will find pleasing to their squaring of the circle, and it has thus far proven insurmountably difficult to answer. AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 2 That we have made so little progress, in more phenomenon that exists and unfolds in the than a third of a century, in creating the kind of medium of time can be made into history. A “new narratives” that Bailyn envisioned, let alone history can be written about any subject, using all in making them publicly useful in the ways the typical methods for the reconstruction of the Bender hopes for, ought to give us pause and past, combining narrative and analysis in a way perhaps make us wonder if we need to rethink that illuminates the emergence and evolution of our expectations and our premises. Perhaps the subject at hand. Almost no subject areas something is wrong with the assumption that the cannot be discussed or treated “historically,” but problem is simply one of translating the findings the reverse is generally not the case. You can of specialists into winsome and flowing language write a history of botany, but you cannot write a that nonspecialists and ordinary citizens can botany of history. grasp. Perhaps the problem goes deeper than It is the peculiar nature of history, therefore, that that. Perhaps there is something vitally it is not so much a discipline or a definite body of important, a missing principle of organization, knowledge, even if we often speak of it as if it that professional historical writing, almost by were, but instead it is a way of seeing and definition, cannot provide. understanding and rendering the world, and a The steady disintegration of history as a way of seeing and understanding and rendering discipline and the loss of a public audience for other forms of knowledge. Is there a proper body history may be two expressions of the same of knowledge that we can call “history” itself? Not problem: the obscuring of the fact that historical really. You would have a hard time finding a knowledge and historical consciousness derive group of the most eminent historians who could their meaning, in a very fundamental way, from agree about the proper content, limits, and their association with our common life, especially characteristics of their own field, let alone our civic life, and therefore with civic education. identify a body of historical knowledge that is The loss of a public audience for history may be essential. That this should be so is due partly to due to the loss of a history for the public, a our “age of fracture,” but also partly to the nature neglect of history’s fundamentally public of the discipline itself. A history is never merely meaning. history, but also a history of something. To his credit, Bender recognizes this and rejects History is also slippery to write about because it the proposition that “because our public culture trains itself on a target that is both indistinct and has fractured and we seem to be losing our constantly moving.