"On top of all this, there is now concern, as there should be, with making historical scholarship speak to the issues of a new epoch in which the rapid flow of people, products, ideas, and violence across borders is challenging familiar concepts of the shape of the world."

The Ends of History
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Part I | II | III

This does not mean that we feel historians should be complacent. My own sense at least is that history, like many other academic disciplines, faces important challenges right now. One reason for this is that shifts are taking place in the economic and technological aspects of scholarly publishing that are leading in directions no one can predict. The very existence and form of Common-place is reflective of this confusing situation. On the one hand, new ways to communicate about the past have become possible (in cyberspace, for example), but on the other hand there is deep concern about the difficulty of finding ways to get certain kinds of ideas into print (due to cutbacks at university presses among other factors).

In addition, significant questions have been raised lately in many quarters over whether there has been too much emphasis put on specialized knowledge and too little attention paid to synthesis in recent decades. This is linked to ongoing debates among historians about what is gained and what is lost when more or less attention is placed on storytelling techniques as opposed to other methods of communicating information about the past.

On top of all this, there is now concern, as there should be, with making historical scholarship speak to the issues of a new epoch in which the rapid flow of people, products, ideas, and violence across borders is challenging familiar concepts of the shape of the world. In the United States, there are also many specific political trends and debates--touching on everything from multiculturalism to feminism to the legacy of slavery--that present historians with new challenges. Never before, perhaps, has history been brought into so many different sorts of contemporary arguments in so many different ways. Some look to history as a remedy to past injustices (as is the case with many discussions of reparations). Others turn to it as a provider of analogies to help make sense of unprecedented events (as was the case in the aftermath of September 11 with the repeated use of references to Pearl Harbor). How exactly professional historians can make their work relevant to these enterprises remains an open question, as is that of whether the discipline has become too politicized or too far removed from political engagement in the past few decades.

Then there is the recurring need for historians to strive to connect their scholarship to the interests of people outside of the academy. Here, as in many other cases, one can see a glass that is half full: for example, my sense is that more and more of my colleagues have been putting their expertise to work in recent years as consultants for documentary film projects, museum exhibitions, and the like. Or one can see a glass that is half empty: for example, reward structures at major research universities may seem to go too far in valuing publications intended only for specialists over those designed to reach and engage broader audiences of readers.

To speak of challenges that need to be faced is very different, however, than to speak of a discipline that is dying or dead.

It is important to note one factor that makes it particular easy for the public to be led astray about Clio's health: those who think in terms of disciplinary challenges as opposed to fiendish plots generally do not write about the issue in general interest periodicals. Conspiracy theorists might see something suspicious in this. They might imagine we keep a low profile so that outsiders will be less aware of how much we have benefited from recent trends. Or they might interpret this as proof that we really do only care about writing things that will interest one another as opposed to nonspecialists (even though some of us do write about other matters for newspapers and popular magazines). There are, however, more mundane reasons for our comparative silence on this issue. Saying Clio is alive and well, just doing more things and fraternizing with a more eclectic bunch of disciplines than she used to, does not seem newsworthy. Moreover, many of us would rather go about our regular work than write polemics. And this "regular work," incidentally, even among historians influenced by theories that have their roots in Paris, often involves trying to make sense of historical events.

My own case may be instructive. Most of my graduate training took place in the 1980s at Berkeley, then a hotbed of interdisciplinary experimentation and the birthplace of the cultural studies journal Representations. Hence, it is no surprise that my dissertation on Chinese social movements included references to literary and cultural theorists and had a lot to say about symbols and discourse. It also, however, contained chapters that reconstructed what happened and why at key moments in the Chinese Revolution. From that eclectic starting point, I have gone on to publish essays (occasionally in nonacademic as opposed to academic periodicals) that could be categorized as contributions to everything from the study of popular culture to the history of a Great Idea (human rights). In addition, I have just coedited (with an anthropologist) a volume called Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities that brings together work by historians and scholars in other disciplines who share an interest in gender. This eclecticism is, I think, not unusual. It reflects a career that has taken shape during a period when no particular trend has been dominant. Many of the things I have just said about myself could be adapted, in general ways, to describe the publishing careers, for example, of early Americanists who were part of my Berkeley graduate school cohort, such as Nina Silber, Stephen Aron, and Elizabeth Reis (a past contributor to Common-Place)

I would also argue that eclecticism is the best word for what has been appearing in the pages of some of the discipline's leading journals of late, including the Organization of American Historians' Journal of American History and the American Historical Association's American Historical Review. That, at least, is my sense after having had the good fortune to be closely affiliated with the latter journal from 1997 through the middle of 2001. (I served first as the associate editor and then, for a year, as the acting editor, while the regular editor, Michael Grossberg, took a sabbatical.)

What exactly have the critics claimed about the AHR in the pieces alluded to above? The New Criterion says it has swung too far to the left--citing as particularly telling its recent publication of radical historian Eric Foner's AHA presidential address, "American Freedom in a Global Age." Himmelfarb, without specifically naming it, clearly sees it as one of the "establishment" periodicals that has been ignoring major topics such as American Protestantism and the nature of citizenship. And Judt presents it as part of a system of "self-censorship" that discourages young historians not just from working on A. J. P. Taylor's favorite topics but also from writing about them clearly.