http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1415508,00.html
Historians in cahoots
Tristram Hunt
Wednesday February 16, 2005
Guardian
In his messianic inauguration address, President Bush spoke of America's
global duty being defined by "the history we have seen together".
Inevitably, this was a reference to the events of 9/11. But given how much a
sense of US revolutionary heritage is now informing current policy, the
broader history that Americans are experiencing together should be an equal
cause for concern.
The latter half of the 20th century saw US scholars lead the way in popular
social history. The world of the workplace, family life, native America and
civil rights was chronicled with verve and style. The delicate oral
histories of social chronicler Studs Terkel opened up the local and
working-class past to mass audiences. He showed how the second world war was
as much the people's as the statesmen's war. On National Public Radio and
the Public Broadcasting Service, history was dissected professionally and
polemically.
Today, you would be hard-pressed to find such broad-ranging investigations
of the American past. Instead, the bookshelves of Borders and Barnes & Noble
are dominated by a very specific reading of the 18th century. This does not,
in God-fearing America, represent a new found interest in the secular ideals
of enlightenment and reason. Rather, an obsessive telling and retelling of
that great struggle for liberty: the American Revolution.
Heroic biography has become the bestselling history brand of Bush's America.
Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin,
John Adams and Abraham Lincoln are all speaking from the grave with
new-found loquaciousness. Barely a week passes without another definitive
life of a Founding Father, Brother or Sister, each one more adulatory than
the last.
Not least the vice-president's wife, Dr Lynne Cheney, whose recent
contribution, When Washington Crossed the Delaware: A Wintertime Story for
Young Patriots, is the kind of "history" that any ministry of information
would have been proud of. Museums and TV schedulers have not been slow to
catch the mood. The New York Historical Society currently hosts a vast
exhibition celebrating the life of Alexander Hamilton ("The Man who Made
Modern America"); the History Channel has even cut into its second world war
telethon to offer a series of bio-pics of great American revolutionaries.
Sadly, none of this has resulted in any substantive reinterpretation of the
revolution or its principal actors. As Simon Schama rightly puts it, this is
history as inspiration, not instruction. Instead of critical analysis, the
public is being fed self-serving affirmation: war-time schlock designed to
underpin the unique calling, manifest destiny and selfless heroism of the US
nation and, above all, its superhuman presidents.
Needless to say, this goes down very well at the White House. We are told
that the president's current reading matter includes biographies of
Washington as well as Alexander Hamilton. For the biographical emphasis on
the Great Man who has the character and vision to transcend as well as
define his times fits well with a presidency that values personal instinct
and prayer above reason and empiricism.
In fact, the historical community seems to be providing the ideal conditions
for the Nietzschean approach of the Bush administration. As one senior
presidential adviser scarily informed journalist Ron Suskind: "We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality ... we'll act again, creating other new realities ...
We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study
what we do."
Rather than tempering such terrifying ambition, US scholars are happy to
play up to it. Historian Eliot Cohen penned an administration-friendly
account of how former US presidents have instinctively been right in matters
military, compared with their hapless, diffident generals, while prolific
biographer Joseph Ellis has sought to offer posthumous suggestions from
George Washington to George W.
At a time when the US imperium is rampaging across the globe, you might have
thought there would be a historical concern to enlighten the domestic
citizenry about foreign cultures and peoples. Instead, public scholars are
feeding the nation's increasingly insulated mentality with a retreat into
the cosy fables of their forebears. Amid the biography and hagiography,
stories of Islamic civilisation or Middle East nation-building are among the
many histories the American people are not seeing.
. Tristram Hunt is the author of Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of
the Victorian City
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