Everyone a Historian

The Presence of the Past, by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

True confession: I read this book after returning home from a short stay in Youngstown, Ohio, near where I lived until I was 12. The roots on my dad's side of the family extend back three generations in this economically distressed corner of northeastern Ohio/northwestern Pennsylvania.. (The fourth generation, and most of the third, has decamped for greener or sunnier pastures.)

With a cousin, I spent much of ny visit trekking through the wet grass of four cemeteries in two states, in search of gravesites that would add a finishing touch to the panoramic annotated genealogy he had compiled. Other hours were spend coaxing reminiscences from my elderly aunt's faded memory.

All this by way of preface to say that Rosenzweig and Thelen got it right.  People engage with history in ways that meet their own needs, that help them to make sense of their own lives.

And much of the time, according to the survey findings on which the book is based. they prefer their personalized history straight up, that is, unmediated by professional historians and conventional sources of historical authority. For example, museums and historic sites and personal accounts, which can be experienced directly, are valued more than school courses or books.

The ways in which folks connect with the past also vary according to race, ethnicity, age and gender, with African-Americans and Sioux Indians having a stronger collective sense of historical identity, and  men age 65 and older regarding American history, rather than family, ethnic or community history, as the most important kind of history to know. People are finding new prisms through which to view history, including sexual identity and evangelical faith.

What does this mean to those of us who aspire to do history? This book illustrates some of the tensions between personallized and professionalized history, most notably the lack of conventional analytic tools, like ethnicity, class, region and gender.  

As an antidote to the "history wars" spawned by the turbulent politics of the '60s and '70s, Rosenzweig and Thelen propose a profoundly humanistic solution, entailing the synthesis of the experiential with the contextualization and systemization that can be added by professional historians. The result would be a participatory, multifocal historical culture. that will empower people to shape social change  and create a new standard for civil and civic discourse.

I'd like to believe, but perhaps my historical memory has been addled by too much talk radio.