by Micah E. Weiss
“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”
–Ulysses S. Grant
What is history for? When a historian–layman or otherwise–writes a history, they are not writing an account of everything that occurred in the factual mold akin to a scientific data set. Not only would that be impossible, but it would also be useless and tedious.
The study of history can illuminate the present, explaining the origin of certain contemporaneous phenomena. History can also be diverting, almost in the mold of fiction, imbibed less for the expansion of personal wisdom, and more for entertainment and escape. History can also be instructive to the reader: parallel moments in time may help one guess the future, and in that sense, history, ostensibly about what has been, can be almost speculative towards what may be. There are many modern historians who also propose with some pretense that history can be a “voice for the voiceless'' from the past. Such historians use words like “Subaltern” and “Marginalized,” and generally consider themselves crusaders in the war against the wrongs of the past. Other historians seem to present their studies as uncovering secret knowledge, the “everything you thought you knew, was wrong! duhn, duhn, duuuhn!” These historians are the most prevalent species on YouTube–everyone likes to think they are party to secret knowledge; it is the real draw of any mystery cult.
However, these many uses of history are, I contend, secondary uses. The primary use of history is quite narrow, and as far as I can tell, elusive to at least some historians themselves. For example, this article contains several explanations to the question of “why history,” and interestingly, all four, far more qualified as historians than I am, fail to identify the primary and central reason civilizations dedicate time, resources, and manpower to the study of history.
Let’s get a few things out of the way. History is the study of texts; without text there is no History. The study of the past without text is called Archeology. Text requires written language, and written language requires a city-based civilization with wealth enough to demand a division of labor complex enough to support a bunch of old dudes who read all day. Oral traditions are in a different category, have their own strictures and rules, and in many ways, contain a majesty that what we understand as History will never achieve. I have no intention of denigrating oral traditions, they just aren’t in the same category as the tradition of history.
What is history for, then? I contend that, not entirely unlike oral traditions, the study of history is primarily a story-telling enterprise, one that focuses entirely on the “true” story of a people and a culture; it is essentially instructive to the people within a culture on who they are because of where they came from, and who they should be. The study of history is about identity within the framework of a larger culture based on truth.
Since Herodotus, there has been an attempt to tell a true and complex story, one the West has spent 2500 years or so developing into a modern academic discipline. The ingredient “truth” is central to the difference, and not because Herodotus was any good at truth finding, but in basing his history at least in part on first hand accounts and interviews with the men who lived the history, he took this all important step away from the myths of oral traditions or King’s scribes to justify the legitimacy of the story he was telling. This is the differentiating factor with oral traditions and early “historians,” that the capital T Truth is knowable, and that it can be compared to other stories that are not True. This is important not because of some undergraduate argument about objective vs relative truth (there is an objective truth, and everyone can just grow up and get over it already), but simply because without that baseline prior belief in Truth, the study of history shifts into myth-making; something more akin, but not limited to, an oral tradition (take a look at what passed for history in the Egyptian tradition for a peek at written mythmaking). And I have no intention of denigrating myth-making any more than oral traditions! I love myths, and they have their own place in culture. In part because of the “Truth” pretense in our history, our myths have developed, almost morphed into our tradition of fictional storytelling. History is maybe more powerful, though less poetic and often less beautiful, than myth these days. It is also far-reaching, influencing generations of historical storytellers millennia longer than myths, even those that aren’t a part of the cultures that produced the relevant history. And though there are arguments that muddy these waters and obscure the lines of demarcation I am drawing, words “based on a true story” at the beginning of a film are trying to get right at us somewhere deep. Objectively speaking, Herodotus is clearly read differently than Ovid.
So, history itself is an act of telling a True story that influences cultural identity formation. One might argue, of course, that when history is relegated to the literate class, as it has been in most times in human history, that the illiterate masses aren’t benefiting from this primary purpose. However, the literate class informs the ruling class, and the ruling class leads the masses, forming, or, more likely, endorsing, the myths that the illiterate use for identity formation. One also might argue that the historians who spend their careers “centering” the “marginalized” and giving “voice to the voiceless,” a regrettably too-large proportion of historians today, study subjects with a tenuous connection, at best, to the cultural identities of those likely to read their histories. However, every time one of the more insufferable individuals of this breed of historian smacks around an undergraduate class for “centering Eurocentric narratives” and then blathers on about his or her dissertation on Andean Goatherd Textile Collectives in the 19th Century, or whatever, he or she isn’t actually helping the Andean Goatherders move to the center of anything beyond his or her ego. That historian is influencing that undergraduate student into adopting the historian’s version of a preferred identity–generally speaking, a guilt-ridden Westerner, who, just like the historian, has no intention of changing their lifestyle of hyper-consumption in favor of a more naturalistic way of living in response to their secret knowledge of the enlightened ways of the Goatherds, but definitely wants that way of living to be fetishized as an idol to the evils of the Western World and its white Supremacist Colonial Project, and feels entitled to indulge in petty rage over historical times and places long gone. . .on Tiktok. Which isn’t to say that the Goatherds don’t have a story to tell; I believe they might. There are historians who authentically and honestly pursue obscure histories without the taint of a transient political agenda. However, I find the former attitude far more prevalent in our age than the latter, and I am somewhat exhausted by the offense I take at the Goatherd’s reduction to pawnhood in a virtue-signaling game of political myth-making. Also, being the grandson of a sometime goatherd from the Old Country, I am disturbed that some goatherds are given preferential “centering” over others depending on the academic’s ability to highlight the victimhood of one set of goatherds over another. Furthermore, there is within this academic posturing the most grotesque pretense of all: that somehow if that historian had only been the one in charge when said Goatherders were being brutally colonized, none of those evils would have taken place because he or she is morally enlightened.
Moral enlightenment itself is also taught these days as the purview of the historian. The evils of slavery, racialized or otherwise, the patriarchal excesses of society and resulting evils, the bigotries of the past generally, the oppression and exploitation of the weak–all of these deeply complex historical realities are taken up by the modern attitude of many historians so that one forgets how commonplace and nearly universal those sufferings were in all civilizations. The presumption of such people, people who themselves have inherited all their moral clarity, and likely never once had to put those morals to the test of real temptation from the soft cushions of their department chairs, bends the most basic credulity.
In the Postmodern world of Lyotard and Foucault, there are other uses of history. The former wanted to destroy grand narratives, and the latter wanted to prove that all history study (and every other human institution to boot) was the practice of power by the powerful over the weak. If either of those propositions are considered, one might ask Lyotard why we should accept his grand narrative that we should reject all other grand narratives, and Foucault who it was he was serving as he spent his life writing history. For the purposes of this essay, it’s important to note that narrative is unavoidable—Lyotard understood this, but did not like its consequences. It takes a writer to enlighten the historian when it comes to narration, and that writer is Hemingway.
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
The shortest of stories, for a $10 bet and of disputed provenance as it was related to a friend by Arthur C. Clark. Nonetheless, with this story, Hemingway demonstrates the reason why history is story. One cannot string together facts without humans making those facts into narrative arcs using their imagination. This felicity of imagination is one of our strongest and most uniquely human traits. That is why history is story; and in every story, the storyteller makes decisions, picking and choosing which facts to use, which ones to leave out, and in which order those facts are presented to the audience.
For example, patriotism and anti-patriotism are stories of identity, and they are acts of history. They are willful, practicable applications of historical facts that take a narrative form. There is usually a series of conversational/argumentative moves that people engage in when taking an anti-patriotic position in this country. The central move is actually in three parts:
Dismiss American ideals as hypocritical or fictional.
List historical evils perpetrated by Americans as proof of hypocrisy.
Dismiss counter-examples using a variety of methods.
Patriots, on the other hand, tend to slide into nationalism (I made a distinction between the two in my last essay on Patriotism) by a simpler two step approach:
Minimizing the evils of the past.
Just ignoring those evils altogether.
For example, everyone has heard the argument that slavery wasn’t so bad. Some right-wing folks also deify the Robber Barons as “Captains of Industry” and characterize their existence as an unalloyed good for our country. The former, of course, is a grotesque lie: slavery was and is one of the deepest of human evils; the latter ignores generations of violent suppression of labor that helped turn Rockefeller from the richest man in America to the richest man in history–and he only had to order the murders of dozens of minors and union organizers to acquire that wealth.
The anti-patriot position is just as dishonest, and seems relegated to the progressive left. Scraping around in the annals for proof that historical figures were flawed human beings is hardly challenging. But the warts are given the spotlight while the accomplishments of nearly any historic hero are denigrated.
Both ideological positions are wrong, of course. Proof of hypocrisy is not a refutation of ideology on the one hand and ignorance is certainly not bliss on the other. It appears that the flaws of both right and left ideological strongholds are easy to see glaring at us from these examples. The right is all too ready to take a worldly hero and canonize him or her into an idol of worship, while the left is psychologically threatened by greatness in the “men of old, the men of renown.” The right begs for authority figures to tell us what to do, while the left are desperate to spare their egos the agony of being compared to better men and women.
In keeping with my last essay on patriotism, however, I do believe that the needle between these can be threaded, provided one focuses on gratitude rather than pride–heroes should be valued for contributions that have improved our culture. While we must acknowledge and own the villains our country has produced, we also need to remember the greatness of our heroes. We can see villains and heroes as challenges to be better than we are rather than a justification for an inflated sense of self righteousness or a threat to our petty and small sense of self-esteem.
Perhaps in another nation, another culture, this essay could not be written. America has always been about ideas and ideals over blood and soil. Though the founders appear to be homogeneous, only the shallow eye could ignore the variety of ideas that went into the creation of our country and government. From the very beginning, as the founders debated our Declarations of Independence and Constitution, America became, essentially, a debate of ideas. It leaves us a little unsteady, for it's never been a single set of ideas or ideals; America is an argument with many threads running through it, some sacred, some profane. The diversity of thought and the negotiation amongst the many diverse positions and perspectives is as much our history as any major event since these threads interweave with and create the events of our history. We can pick and choose the best ideas out of the many that exist, and move forward with them while discarding the rest with as much careful discernment as we can muster. If we look at history and acknowledge how far we’ve come, who helped get us here, and what greatness lay within those individuals, we can build an admirable list of exemplars; not gods, but men and women, who help us aspire to something greater than ourselves.
Take the two men in the photo at the top of this essay. The one on the left is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the one on the right is Nathan Bedford Forrest. (I don’t know what it was during the American Civil War about having three names that is connected to being imbued with astonishing amounts of personal bravery, but it seems to be a thing). Both were courageous beyond the ken of mortal men, injured multiple times during the Civil War, injured so severely at one point that it was somewhat miraculous that either survived oddly similar injuries involving a minié ball penetrating their pelvises. Both were extraordinary leaders of men, both led from the front, fought sometimes hand to hand, killed men, narrowly escaped death, and could easily have their faces printed under any encyclopedia description of “valor.” The only other similarity between them is that they were both American. I contend that neither man could have been born anywhere else, believed in the things they believed in, adhered to the ideals that made them, nor volunteered for war with the motivations that moved them to that end had they been born in any other country. You cannot take the Americanness away from these two men and find any corollary personage in any other country. They are representative of the dichotomy of our nation, our history, our people; the two sides of the coin of who we were, are, and can be someday.
Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of our greatest villains. Born in 1821, in many ways he was a child of the frontier–son of a settler, a blacksmith, with little money or resources. Forrest’s life was a classic American bootstrap tale, though the his bootstraps were made of the slave trade. Growing rich before the Civil War on cotton and slaves, he joined the Confederate army with enthusiasm albeit little to no training and became the most feared cavalry officer in perhaps all of American history. Unfortunately, this military acumen did not come with a strong sense of humanity, as he was the officer in charge during the massacre of United States troops at the now legendary Fort Pillow in 1864–the cause of the massacre seems to have been that many of the US soldiers were either black or white Tennessee-born Union men. Objects of resentment if black, or betrayal if white, it is easy to imagine how Forrest’s men felt towards these two groups of soldiers. Driven by scorn and perhaps sensing that the war was slipping away, Forrest’s men turned that resentment into blood-letting. It’s hard to know how many were killed trying to surrender, but it is estimated that at least half of the 221 soldiers killed died in what we would now call a war crime. It is unclear how much Forrest is personally responsible as the fog of war is thick, but he was the officer in charge, and US military doctrine would dictate that the responsibility lies heaviest with the commanding officer. After the war, Forrest distinguished himself little better, being an early adopter of the Ku Klux Klan, acting as their first Grand Wizard, and playing a role in suppressing the vote of newly freed slaves in the election 1868.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in Maine in 1828 to a middle class family. His mother wanted him to join the clergy. Instead, he planned on attending Bowdoin College near his home in Brunswick, Maine. However, he didn’t have any Latin or Greek, so he locked himself in his room for the entirety of his 19th year of life and taught himself both languages. He soon became a scholar of modern languages, as well as a professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (which is 19th century academic speak for English Teacher). A transcendentalist and close friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, whom Chamberlain taught with at Bowdoin for a time, he was an early adopter of abolition and one of many Northerners who knew exactly what the Civil War was about the moment it started (for the uninitiated, it was about slavery). Preaching openly to his students at Bowdoin that they should enlist, but unable to do so himself as he was under contract with the college, he applied for and received a sabbatical ostensibly to study in Europe. Instead of seeing Europe, he joined the United States Army. He wrote extensively about his experiences in the years after the war including how he was once caught in an open field, unable to escape when night fell, and forced to shiver all night under the bodies of his dead comrades on the field of Fredericksburg while the Aurora Borealis was seen in the Virginia night sky. He once accepted the surrender of a Confederate officer who handed his sword to Chamberlain with one hand, while he shot at Chamberlain with the other hand–luckily, the officer missed. Chamberlain was wounded at least five times, possibly six, but he is best known for saving the entire Union Army from being routed on the second day of Gettysberg by holding the end of the line on the extreme left flank of the 90 thousand man army at a place called the Little Round Top. At the end of a long day of fighting off charge after charge of some brave boys from Alabama, almost out of ammunition, and possibly with fate of the war at stake (a fun and debatable point for a counterfactual to engage in), Chamberlain inspired his men with powerful words and charged with them down into the attacking Confederate line, taking them by surprise, taking many prisoners, winning the day and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Later in the war, he was so severely wounded outside Petersburg that General Grant, thinking death was probable, gave Chamberlain a battlefield promotion to Brigadier General. Living through several horrific surgeries on his lower abdomen and bladder to remove a bullet (unsuccessfully as it remained lodged in his pelvis for the rest of his life), Chamberlain surprised everyone by surviving the wound and the war, living to see and write about the surrender at Appomattox. Returning to Maine after the war, he became the president of Bowdoin College, where his statue still stands, teaching nearly every subject and championing the study of modern languages at the university level. He also served as Governor of Maine for four consecutive terms. He died of his ancient wound at the age of 86, and could be considered the last combat death of the American Civil War.
In case it's not clear, I am a fan.
But what is the point? Why so thoroughly run through the mirror biographies of these men? Because they are both America. They are the polarities of those times. We must own both men, if we are to share their country, and the history they lived. They are a part of us and our culture. We should not pick and choose one or the other as legitimate. We can, however, pick and choose which man we make a hero, admire, and emulate. When we teach our children of the Civil War, we can tell them a story of the war through two men, both Americans. One from the dark side, and the one from the light, and that at least for a short while, the light side won–until the next battle began.
I once attended a history lecture during which the presenter was so busy blowing everyone’s mind with grubby little details of some individual American’s conduct during the Revolutionary War that I felt compelled to challenge him afterwards in private conversation. Yes, some of the loyalist families were not treated well by the revolutionaries, and some of the arguments the British made about Colonial Americans being unreasonable were, well, reasonable. But I objected to his picking and choosing only those little known (and small scale) factoids while leaving out what he acknowledged was the greater part of the story–that the British Parliament was clearly abusing its power, and treating the colonials with condescension and disdain, provoking a war of ideas in an era of ideas and new ideals–this is the true story, still. He agreed, eventually, but the lecturer said that his intention was to encourage a nuanced understanding of history–to which I agreed wholeheartedly. But he seemed to think that telling the negative elements was the only way to talk about history and so I asked him: what do you tell a five year old girl on the fourth of July who is waving a little American flag at the town parade?
And that question holds for us, because in a sense, we are all that little girl, we are small and humble creatures, we are all Salinger’s fat lady. No matter how smart we are, or educated, or privileged, or morally enlightened, we, all of us (even you) need to believe in something greater than ourselves that is a part of our community, and too many great men and women did it for the country they left to us as their legacy for me to remain unmoved by patriotism. Should we snatch that flag away from the little girl and sneer and say, “Well, ya know, the Sons of Liberty tarred and feathered the King’s tax man in the streets of Boston!” or do we remind ourselves that over 20 thousand colonial soldiers died in British prison barges in New York Harbor, mainly of starvation and exposure, when all they had to do to be free was to swear allegiance to the English Throne? Both are true, both are American stories. Both need to be understood, but when we look at ourselves as citizens of a nation, and we want to move forward in our lives engaging in political discourse, the sacrifice of those men, or the accomplishments of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, U. S. Grant, George Washington, Robert Carter, Thaddeus Stevens, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Al Smith, Theodore Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr., just to name a few (and if you don’t know some of those names, or why I included them, ask yourself why not?), must mean something to us as Americans who live with the fruits of their labors. That demands gratitude, which is, as I have previously argued, the wellspring of true patriotism. They speak to the greatness of our history and country, and they challenge us to be better–we should be humbled by their example, and honor their striving, their efforts, by being better ourselves. In order to engage in the argument of our unique country’s history, to be grateful for their accomplishments and their example is an act of history and an act of Patriotism.