The Past is being Rewritten by the Trump Administration
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Tech Admin
Given the ideological underpinnings, I'm not sure these stories were ever merely ignored through benign neglect.The writing of History is inevitably a political choice unless somebody still believes in a Von Rankean objectivity. This is about public history and how a gov't chooses to display and interpret aspects of a country's history for its populace. In this case, it is a very public erasure of the lived experiences of certain population groups whose story the administration does not want interpreted and told. Historians and the administration used to ignore these stories through benign neglect with equally unacceptable ideological underpinnings. It seems to me given the historiographical evolution of history as a discipline, all history topics would be placed in Epiphanies.
The scapegoating of minorities has been around a long time. And as much as progressive policies of inclusion are signalled through the recognition of historical figures - maybe even endorsed by the minority groups they represent, the authoritarian re-interpretation of a nation's history and removal of such figures looks like part of a deliberate policy of re-scapegoating minorities.
The question is how this relates to historiography and the evolution of history as a discipline. As the wikipedia page puts it:
One aspect of the question is how these shifts come about - are they a reflection of prevailing societal and cultural values, or do they lead them, providing new perspectives on societies which are influenced by new ideologies (and which, in effect, might disseminate those ideologies)?The research interests of historians change over time, and there has been a shift away from traditional diplomatic, economic, and political history toward newer approaches, especially social and cultural studies.
...
20th-century historiography in major countries is characterized by a move to universities and academic research centers.
This puts me in mind of the development and significance of Marxist historiography (and history from below), and how they relate to authorities (in the wider sense of those who are authoritative), including academics and governments.
[Changed title of OP from Historiography, or not historiography, that is the question to make it clearer what's being discussed - Tubbs]
Comments
In my own field, interest in the witch- hunt (whose victims were disproportionately female in Scotland) goes far beyond academic historians - there are popular movements of ordinary people on Facebook,
communities affected historically by the witch hunt fund memorials and turn out for events dedicating them, public historians write popular books, podcasters make long series about it, and government and public heritage bodies have been drawn in for apologies and campaigns for pardons. Now you might trace that back to the ground breaking academic work of Christina Larner and her book 'Enemies of God' and surely to some extent that's the case - and we all, even if we dont know it, still stand to some extent on her shoulders. I go back to her work regularly and find things of value in it but in another sense it doesn't matter - what matters is we're here, we're talking about misogyny and torture both in the past and now and we don't need to get fancy about historiography to see why talking about this kind of history is important.
It's a bit similar in shape to UK Black history - it's not just ( here) David Olusoga and other Black scholars - those histories are embedded in communities who take ownership of their own history - as we saw eg. in the BLM response to the Edward Colston statue. Public heritage bodies and governments have increasingly responded both to community demand for representation and visibility, and to work based in excellent new academic research by scholars - as the funding and the drive for such research has increased (though under current cuts such research has fallen victim a suspicious amount of times in really excellent departments that maybe we can't say confidently any more that things are going forward and not back).
Similarly to the terrible situation in America which I'm going to come onto - there has been a white supremacist attack on these developments in Black history. Because of UK libel laws though I can name all the names it's probably best I don't, because I want to call them what they are - white supremacist propagandists and racists who pose as historians working in good faith but aren't.
These are people who are either not historians or historians way outside of their field of competence and expertise who maliciously trade on their academic credentials in unrelated matters to get credence in the right wing media and who are treated as 'balance' by centrist media who ought to know better than to platform racist shills who have zero credence among actual experts in these fields but they fucking don't, with predicatable results in mainstreaming this stuff and getting it repeated as talking points by racist ignoramuses who can point to this stuff to legitimate their views and to dismiss people who actually have worked with integrity and know what they're talking about.
You can see their sort and their followers every year tediously attacking the National Trust as 'woke' because it's not doing all great white men and 'wasn't the empire wonderful?' history in its historical displays and interpretation.
But what's happening in America is on a different level altogether. It's authoritarian white supremacism where it's gone beyond the kind of pseudo-intellectual racist rentagobs I'm talking about and the actual stormtroopers and vandals are in charge and destroying things. And its not just history - all kinds of science and government reports and bodies are being purged of anything and anyone that represents people who are not white straight cis males
Jamelle Bouie has been good on this -
Trump’s war on DEI is really a war on civil rights
As Bouie also says 'Competent white men must be in charge” is as close to a rallying cry as I can imagine for the Trump administration although, of course, it strains credulity to say that either Trump or his subordinates count as competent'
So I don't want to just talk about history - this is part of an outright white supremacist fascist attack designed to push people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ and indigenous people back into subjection where the worst white man is held to be better than the most qualified woman or Black person etc.
We should see our own historical racists in the UK for what they are - the enablers and, at best, useful idiots of white male supremacy which can only be obtained by authoritarianism and deception and the wolves taking on sheep's clothing to enable it, but it's already come to America and it goes far beyond history and heritage.
And in this context I think of some of the pushback there was to the work of Caroline Elkins in re-examining just one corner of the Imperial legacy.
As a semi-throwaway, I have concerns from both sides of the argument to be honest (I’ve studied history to postgraduate level).
Firstly the way history was traditionally taught was a series of limited horizons, great men and the Whig interpretation, overlaid by Marxism to a great extent in the UK universities post WW2.
So it was ripe for broadening, and getting away from the old structures.
However.
I think we’re in a post-postwar historiography now. I think a much greater proportion of the population 30 years ago or so knew what they were kicking against/replacing - ie to an extent they could do the ‘new’ history because they had a shared framework of the ‘old’ history to kick against.
That’s completely gone now. We have a historical landscape that’s incoherent and atomised to an unprecedented extent.
Bluntly I wonder if we’re needing to relearn the wisdom of a shared chronological narrative onto which everything else can be bolted?
My own experience of secondary school history was basically the Tudors and the Nazis, plus WW1 and the Arab Israeli conflict, and the 1879 Anglo Zulu War.
All the gaps* were filled in subsequently through own reading.
But then I do totally appreciate that we get into a bun fight about who decides what goes into the shared narrative. But I still think we need one. The danger is, to quote the history boys, you end up with ‘gobbets’ - you’ve ‘done’ the suffragettes because you’ve had a lesson on them. But you can’t study anything properly in the 7 years of secondary school, even assuming you keep history to A Level. And only a minority will pick up a history book again in later life.
It’s really political, it’s really knotty, and I don’t know what the answer is.
Part of me would want to go back to a dry procession of dates, just so those interested can go back and add nuance later. I do really worry about the loss of the past-now sweep of dates from the national brains.
Chronology is power.
*yes, gaps = everything else that has happened in the world. Ever.
For actual history lessons, though, I think the teaching of historical method, particularly source analysis, is vital. There is a lot of talk about media literacy and the need to help people recognise misinformation, but it seems to me like that's a fight that's hard to win by starting with present day issues, particularly in societies where parents tend to push this misinformation onto their children. Much better to start with fights no-one alive today has a dog in, and build the skills and habits of source evaluation. It's a lot easier to fill in gaps in historical knowledge than in skill.
If that’s a good in itself then it needs to be taught as such *as well* IMO?
But I do think this is the problem with history. There’s a middle class assumption that anyone can do it (because it’s ‘just’ reading, and a certain sort of person picks it up for pleasure in middle age, and after all, everyone has an opinion…), so academically at a school level it repeatedly gets hollowed out and treated as the vehicle for whatever bag of bolts it has been decided children need to know.
Really, it goes right back to the people huddled round the fire in caves telling tales - history is who we are, where we came from, where we’re going… it’s the most powerful, beautiful, dangerous thing humanity has ever come up with. If we have it not we die. It can be a lens for the world of today but that’s one facet of the gemstone, no more or less vital/problematic/contested than the others.
History deserves better.
TBH that's true of everything taught in school. With a packed curriculum you're looking for the things that give the most bang per buck. Historical content absolutely needs to be taught, but every subject in the curriculum needs to pull its weight in transferable skills as well as knowledge. History is a good vehicle for teaching source analysis precisely because (for most of it) children need to be taught the events and context too so your aren't generally fighting as many preconceptions.
Of course where this comes undone is when teachers (and policy makers) bring their own biases to the choice of topic and the selection of sources. It's also vulnerable to being biased by the availability of (particularly primary) sources. It's pretty hard to get primary source data from the Aztec side of the wars with the Conquistadors.
The syllabus is one way, though tbh I can't even recall what periods we studied - the Irish Church Disestablishment 1869 rings a faint bell. Most of the history I have absorbed has been from studying literature and art. But there again you have personal responses to events and commissioned ones (Shakespeare's history plays, any amount of frescoes). Latterly the narratives have moved into popular print, film, TV, which favour the showier bits - Romans, Tudors, the Regency, the Wild West, the World Wars. The best can be imaginative recreations of verifiable events (Wolf Hall) but often more or less wild departures.
We live in a porridge of myths and stories. The present US administration has, ISTM, dismantled a version of America to the world, built up post-war as the ally, the beacon of democracy, the bulwark against totalitarianism, the welcomer of huddled masses. Instead it seems intent on a self image of the invincible strong man, beholden to no one. This requires not just erasure but creation, so how will this play out in popular culture?
Bristol Museums exhibition commentary on Edward Colston: And the statue's future:
Extracts from the statue's wikipedia entry:
Tim Cole's comment comes from a 2021 article by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic called History Was Never Subject to Democratic Control - extracts:
Regarding the suggestion of there being a few basic chronologies that should be taught, I'm not convinced there's such a thing as a bare-bones chronology of historical events relating to a given period and place, even as a dry skeleton of dates. Any deliberate selection of events communicates the relative significance of those events, and reveals something about whoever it is doing the selecting - the criteria they are applying, the colour of the spectacles through which they're looking at the past. There is no such thing as a "neutral" history.
As Firenze points out, there can be concurrent but totally different versions - which history of the potato do we tell ourselves, should we tell ourselves, or to others?
I'm not sure there's anything particularly pleasurable about "doing" history - it's an essential part of understanding who we are (and remembering that those who cannot remember the past...). Human beings aren't just story-tellers, we're history tellers (and herstory and theirstory).
So I suspect it isn't "history" that needs to be taught so much as how to learn from history and how to learn and tell our own history, at least as a starting point. The trickier question is how to arrive at shared views and understandings of history. In this regard, one of the things I see in the above stories of Edward Colston's statue is the possibility of history as a democratic project.
I like the imagery of living in a porridge - sustaining and drowning. (Like The Magic Porridge Pot, perhaps?)
As for wondering how things will play out, popular culture has been addressing this for some time now, especially in the guise of speculative fiction. The Handmaid's Tale comes to mind.
That's true. I suppose I was mostly thinking in terms of trying to pin the historical events of "general knowledge" to a timeline rather than create a list of events deemed important, though of course the events that become general knowledge are culturally conditioned and reflect existing biases. It's partly wishful thinking, that I'd like people to know roughly when the pyramids were built, when China first had an Emperor, when there were Samurai in Japan, how long ago "cave men" were around, when we first see written records, the things that might give perspective and a sense of the depth of history. But I appreciate it's pretty much an impossible task.
How can we learn from history if we haven't been taught what it is?
I have to say, a lot of this is sounding to me like an approach to the academic subject of history that seeks to teach children only the parts (and interpretations) that are necessary in order to push them towards the beliefs it wants them to hold. But that's not history, it's indoctrination, and if it's wrong for the MAGA crowd to do it for their ends then it's also wrong for progressives to do it for their ends.
Edward Colston has already been mentioned. He was an active and unrepentant slave trader. He was also a philanthropist of uncommon generosity. Which of these is "the truth"? Surely the answer is that they both are, and history as an academic subject should record both the good and the bad without downplaying either in the name of telling "the right story" and teaching "the right things". People can do great good and great evil, and some people do both at the same time. The good does not make the evil less worthy of condemnation, but neither does the evil make the good less worthy of praise. Ignoring the good in order to more effectively condemn the evil is no better than ignoring the evil in order to more effectively praise the good.
The dodo died out around the end of the 17th century. (All but a few avian) dinosaurs died out around 66 million years ago. What do the orders of magnitude between those two time-spans convey to us? Would it make much difference to our perspective if dinosaurs had died out 6000 years ago?
I suppose a more general question is to ask what we learn from history when we measure it. Why is one of the first questions we ask when looking at something old is "how old is it"? What do we gain by learning to value things in terms of their age?
Another example: On May 31 and June 1. 1921 there was a race riot in Tulsa OK. Was not discussed in the generalized history books until 2020. Now, if you think it was caused by the black population, you would be mistaken. Whites were envious of the prosperity in the black neighborhood.
Several years ago, I became friends with a guy from Kenya. After some time he asked me what I new of the Mau Mau Revolution. Sad to say, I grave the British line at the time. That they were a ruthless group. My friend was Kiduyu. Needless, to say he disabused me of that notion. In actuality, it was the British that were quite ruthless in their suppression of the independence movement. He told me of the time the British attacked his village. He was shot in the leg himself.
In truth, most Americans have little grasp of history from other perspectives. There is the old saying, if we don't know history we are bound to repeat it. That happened in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When Trump proposes the US take over Gaza, his simply does not know the history of the Nakba. All he sees is potential dollar signs.
I made reference to this above in connection with Elkins; note that this was a case in which historical documents had been deliberately destroyed as part of Operation Legacy, and further documents unlawfully retained beyond the time during which they should have been released to the public.
Amen!
You can see more of the kind of thing he was talking about here
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/pentagon-removes-webpages-celebrating-racial-integration-of-the-armed-forces
To 'both sides' that with Black people asking that certain people who have committed monstrous crimes against humanity against them not be centres of iconic public commemoration and glorification in communities they are part of is breathtaking.
We're not talking 'ran up a few gambling debts cheated on their spouse but gave money to the local cat and dogs home' - we're talking people who made money from the systematic rape, torture and working to death of Black people in chattel enslavement in the 17th- 19th centuries
You want to know about these people? Read about them, take courses about what they did - but don't publicly memorialise them as great in the faces of those whose communities suffered so much from their crimes against humanity.
Reflecting the varied communities that make up a nation in its public representation and curricula does not equal maliciously scrubbing official websites and curricula for the purposes of white supremacism. To pretend it does any thing like that comes close to helping to justify and launder white supremacy in action.
And as for the straw man of allegedly 'erasing' the philanthropic stuff that some enslavers managed to do in their spare time from making money from systematic rape and murder- quite a few of the organisations which are beneficiaries of such blood money have been hiring historians to carefully document that and have publicly recognised that - using various ways to acknowledge that they benefitted from other people being tortured and murdered - as is only right. This history has become better known and documented than ever. So much for erasure.
Except in this case there's an asymmetry in the narrative isn't there, the evil is rendered clinically in facts and figures and the victims had no voice, while the good is accompanied by the testimony of the philanthropist. Similarly you'd presumably object on the grounds of lack of evidence if he was called 'cruel', yet the judgement that what he did was 'worthy of praise' necessarily excludes the possibility that it was the self-serving act of a childless man who wished to perpetuate a legacy.
How so? These are well documented statements. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_American_Civil_War
It’s not universal by any means, though. Not to mention that there are lots and lots of Southerners who have never viewed it this way, even if a lot of the white ones did.
I have lived in the South all of my 64 years, and I’ve rarely heard “the War of Northern Aggression,” except when used in an ironic or humorous way by someone trying to sound “Old South.” While “the War of Northern Aggression” may once have been used by people who bought into Lost Cause Mythology, I normally have heard “the Civil War,” or occasionally “the War Between the States,” typically from people of my grandparents’ generation. In school it was pretty much always “the Civil War.”
But the even bigger problem with your post is in statements like “Southerners say [the Civil War] was about states rights.” You seems to be using “Southerners” to mean white Southerners. But lots of Southerners aren’t white, and whites are not the default Southerners. I’m pretty sure that African American Southerners understand very well that the Civil War was about slavery. (And lots of white Southerners do as well.)
To be honest, your post strikes me as an illustration of what this thread is all about. Your sweeping generalizations about what “Southerners” think and say effectively erases the experiences of the many Southerners, notably non-white Southerners, who don’t fit the stereotype you’ve presented as normative if not universal.
And all of these histories are important.
To me, as I get older, it feels like a resource allocation problem. There is just *so* *much* *story* in every historical event, and you have to figure out what's salient. You can't record everything, so you have to figure out what's worth paying attention to.
"North was anti-slavery, south was pro-slavery," this is an important part of the narrative of the civil war, yes, but it's a paltry one and I think it does a disservice to the men and women who had to endure the experience on both sides.
Yes, I did speak in the present tense. The Republican party's Southern Strategy bets that there are a sufficient number of Southerners that still believe this. Witness how Hegseth is renaming the southern bases their old Confederate names by using more modern figures who just happen to have those same names.
Ew. I didn’t know Hegseth was pulling that. Ugh…
In general, "history" as an academic discipline isn't about recording the past, it's about studying the past, through the interpretation of a wide range of evidence, employing a wide range of approaches.
You're free to portray teaching people "how to learn from history and how to learn and tell our own history" as ideological indoctrination. But why are you so unconcerned about the ideological plank in your own eyes?
Back at Edward Colston's statue, the We Are Bristol History Commission report on the public consultation and survey ended the section "Sentiment on toppling the statue: Conclusions" with the following:
I've already described him as an active and unrepentant slave trader. Adding "cruel" to that description seems a tad superfluous to me.
Is the notion that philanthropy is worthy of praise really a controversial one?
It's like wanting to praise philanthropy or scientific advances in the context of war criminals oblivious to how that would feel to people whose families relatives and members of their communities they murdered or helped murder.
David Olusoga writing about the trial of those accused in toppling the Colston statue gives a good read on how that kind of display of praise is experienced
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/06/britains-shameful-slavery-history-matters-thats-why-a-jury-acquitted-the-colston-4
There's a difference between historically documenting crimes against humanity, noting that those involved thought of themselves as philanthropists or gave money to good causes etc - despite what they were part of - and bringing 'praise' into it.
Documentation in appropriate circumstances that people thought like that is important but bringing 'praise' into it is something else. That's adding insult to injury to those affected
And I've talked to "northerners" who also are in favor of doing that because the political fronts have realigned.
The movement toward "hating the federal government" has spread far and wide through much of the USA, for reasons that are related to racism and even slavery, but have gotten more complicated.
A lot of it is, I think, just "Me first! Get those other people out of my way." And if the federal government makes any gesture toward equity or inclusion of other people, is outrage.
I don't think that's just about the Civil War anymore. And it explains why a lot of places that were historically pro-union are now lining up for Ill Douche. I grew up in one of those places. It's not that they were ever more moral, it's just perceived economic self interest.
This conversation is about historiography.
The Apollo programme was heavily reliant on Werner von Braun's knowledge of rocket propulsion - knowledge he obtained through the development of V2 rockets for Nazi Germany. Does that mean the moon landings and all scientific advancement they enabled are irredeemably tainted and every picture, book, museum exhibit or TV program about them should be either removed or prominently caveated so that nobody will ever again think of them without a sense of disgust at the evil from which they came?
Why "thought of themselves" and "despite"? Is it so hard to understand that people can be both good and evil, that as Solzhenitsyn said:
Because - even leaving aside the victims[*] - it may well be that giving money away was an entirely self centred act, motivated by the idea of a historical legacy rather than out of a desire to promote the welfare of others (which rather disqualifies it as "philathropic").
Generally, if everyone would also remember to try to use own voice material. This may be academic to you personally, but the consequences are very real for many people.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
Here's an ugly history lesson on that topic, the Draft Riots in NYC.
The more you look at real history, the more complex it gets. And it's a lot harder to make sweeping statements about great masses of people. You have to get into particulars. And the choice of whose particulars get highlighted is always political. Generally, the broader the range of voices included, the more detailed the picture, and the more accurate.
The key word here is 'praise' - putting a statue up or keeping a statue up with a fulsome dedication is 'praise'. Those whose communities weren't harmed advocating keeping that in the faces of people whose communities were grossly harmed by the racist crimes of the subject of the praise is abhorrent to put it mildly.
There was a metaphor used by an Irish journalist Patrick Freyne about British royalism
It's a humorous quote but it's also a reminder that one person's innocent display can be somebody else's pain and grief. If we care about people then we take that into account.
Sticking a statue of The Honourable McRandom-WarCriminal up or keeping it up when their victims or the descendants of victims complain is a choice, putting two fingers up to the victims of McRandom-Warcriminal. Insisting that the McRandom-WarCriminal building keep it's name is also being a jerk to those people.
Did McRWC also give a lot of money to the Sick Kittens hospital? I'm generally in favour of being nice to sick kittens but going on about this being wonderful could come off as trying to launder McRWC's reputation or just being a jerk, as if kittens are more important than racist genocide. We can note McRWC had an interest in kitten welfare and treated them better than children who the ghastly piece of work didn't mind murdering or using for forced labour but praise? Naw - let's be careful not to add insult to injury to those who suffered things we hope will never happen to us or our families.
First listen to the people affected and then try not to add insult to their injury. When it's necessary to write about the subject do so understanding as much as possible of the raw hurts around these crimes. Beware of insisting on 'praise' for people who hurt others, not you.
But to equate people trying to mitigate hurtful racist and white supremacist legacies with people trying to bring back and enforce white supremacy by crude purges is absolutely a false equivalence which helps racists to pretend what they are doing is somehow justified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography
Here is Britannica's entry
https://www.britannica.com/topic/historiography
You will get pretty short shrift defending or praising Von Braun in Britain.
My grandmother, who as a Croydon resident was under some of his early efforts in rocketry, was on the picket line when his hagiography (‘aren’t I/NASA great?’) was released in the UK.*
*‘I Aim At The Stars’** (1960)
**’but sometimes I hit London’
As far as I can tell, you appear to be advocating that methodologies should avoid addressing the question of how historical figures should be remembered, presumably in the belief that this somehow equates to a neutral point of view. But, at the same time, you appear comfortable with the uncritical reporting of a historical figure's direct manipulation of how they should be remembered, while paying rather less attention to what the people directly affected by their activities feel about how those historical figures should be remembered.
You appear to take the position that all acts of philanthropy are equally worthy of praise, regardless of the origins of the funding, the motivation of the giver, or the causes which they choose to support. I wonder if you consider all philanthropists to be equally deserving of honour for their philanthropy.
The wikipedia article does indeed include a caveat: He was a member of the Nazi party, and the wikipedia article summaries his career in the Allgemeine SS. It also notes: It remains to be seen whether his name will be removed from the complex in due course.
The city of Bristol is in the gradual process of removing Colston's name from a wide variety of buildings, institutions and organisations.
Tom Lehrer wrote a song about these aspects of Von Braun…
https://youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio?si=H7vYM0MmoG5UdJi7
In truth Critical Race Theory is a college level discipline. I have been reading some material that is CRT. I have to say I learned a lot.
Years ago, when we moved to California, we drove past the Manzanar Relocation Center. Mrs, Gramps. who grew up in New Jersey, asked about it. When I explained it was a Japanese American internment camp during WWII, she was scandalized. She had never heard such a thing. Yet, since I grew up near such a camp in Idaho, I knew of such things quite young. Goes to show how one's locale can inform one's historical knowledge.
And it's not exclusively geographical. You can find racism and white anxiety all over the damned place, even in Chicago.
Hell, just read that what MLK Jr had to say about Chicago after he got struck with a rock during one of his marches up here. It's nothing to be proud of. Here's a source.