I Heart History

One of my Tweets (take that, Musk!) went semi-viral recently--for a historian on Twitter, that means Kevin Kruse retweeted me--for a link to a brilliant essay by one of my long-ago former professors, Barbara Fields.  It's here if you haven't seen it.  And it's got me thinking thoughts, about Fields, and about history.

Dr. Fields meant nothing in particular to me at the time--I only had one class with her, and even there she was just a name on the top of the syllabus for "History of the South," the person who stood in front of the room and read every day from her pre-written lecture notes.  She did so with a style and ability that was, truly, phenomenal--she would go so far as to do the different Southern accents as she read off quotations.  I'll never forget the moment she switched from high-born Southern elite to Kentucky country twang.  It got a huge laugh, and I think of it almost every time one of my silly little jokes lands in lecture. (I especially thought of it yesterday when I had to read a title aloud in German, a language which I do not speak, and the students' amused looks on hearing me try to read it properly.)

But, as an undergrad who'd just switched majors to history, I had no idea who Fields was.  Even once she assigned her article on "Race, Slavery, and Ideology in the USA," I still didn't understand exactly how big a figure she was.

It wasn't until grad school when I found that just about every professor I had (a) assigned David Roediger and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and (b) used Barbara Fields as the old vision of racial formation that was swept away by these newer brilliant voices.  Suddenly I understood who was standing in front of the classroom all those years earlier.  It was really only after I heard folks misinterpreting Fields and putting words into her mouth that I understood, at least for a moment, her temper when folks misinterpreted her in front of her, or misquoted her, even slightly.  (I was guilty of this myself; I once used the word "excuse" when she'd use the word "explain," and got, appropriately in retrospect, a good four-minute explanation of what the difference between those two terms was.)  I understood, a little better, her emphasis on precise language, and perhaps even why she read from the script in front of her when she lectured.  There was no room for imprecision in Dr. Fields' world, and no patience for it.

She was, if you will, a Scholar of the highest rank, even if I didn't in the least understand it at the time.

If what Fields did in those moment taught me how she viewed history, it also helped me come to terms with how I viewed it.  Her emphasis on precision is important, even admirable.

But some parts of history are incredibly, beautifully, imprecise.  It's so much about approaching the truth and almost never about getting there, all about trying to imagine the past in a way that a precise science could never use imagination.  There is something creative about the discipline, in the best of ways--whether we write a lot or not (this is the longest thing I've written in a year, myself), we are all storytellers, piecing together causes and effect, putting events on top of one another and behind one another in different ways until we get some sort of a picture that makes enough sense to us.  History is my just-turned nine-year old son, back when he still played with magnet blocks, putting together pieces until he could make the structure he wanted.

And even as that creative aspect of history is tremendously imprecise, is artistic and even playful, we are expected to get the pieces we use from documents that require tremendous precision to read and understand.

It is those two halves of the discipline--mining documents for information and piecing them back together--that really make it fun, especially for someone like me, with a limited attention span.  When the documents aren't working for me, it's nice to be able to switch to the block-building portion of the work; and when the blocks aren't coming together right, I can always go back to the documents.

I may not be able to write much this week, or even this year.  But I know I'll come back to it.  I can't help it.  Once you love something, it's got you, pretty much forever.

History's got me, pretty much forever.  For all its faults, its controversies, its foolishness, there's something truly magical about what we do.  Seriously, how do other people have jobs that are not historian?  

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