History and Complexity ...
Rather than asking"how we best know the past" in toto, the real question that every historian has to ask is how to best answer a particular historical problem. What we study depends on what we want to know. For some questions about the past, studying"everyday life" is essential; for other questions, the"actions of powerful individuals" must be examined.I'm inclined to be the skeptic wherever John Dewey is philosopher/king. KC's point, I think, would be that if the conversation is without constitutional/diplomatic/political historians, as the conversations at Michigan have increasingly become, the constitutional/diplomatic/political questions may be left out -- not because they are irrelevant or even because the conversationalists would not acknowledge the relevance if the question came up -- but simply because no one is there who is likely to raise them.As in any academic enterprise, historians have to be selective in their methods, but always with an appreciation that other methods are equally viable for other problems. Which problems are in most urgent need of solving is another question, and Burke is right to suggest that we need less finger-pointing and more serious discussion of this issue. But even if we were to ask this meta-question, we would not avoid selective emphasis. The past is too complex, its subject matter too vast, for us to ever believe that we have found the most important segment of it. I was originally attracted to history because historians seem to realize this, and their transparency about the necessary selectivity of intellectual life helps remind us that life itself is irreducibly complex, and that understanding it fully will always elude our grasp. We can say of history what John Dewey argued of philosophy--that when we selectively emphasize something,"there is no idea of denying what is left out, for what is omitted is merely that which is not relevant to the particular problem at hand."
Of course, Dewey went on to say ... that"in philosophies, this limiting condition is often wholly ignored. It is not noted and remembered that the favored subject-matter is chosen for a purpose and that what is left out is just as real and important in its own characteristic context." The same, alas, is often true in histories. Bravo to Burke for reminding historians not to forget that emphasis is always selective.
Having said that, one of KC's other claims, that departmental hires should be held to the highest standards of merit, comes into play here, as well. I've just finished reading A Murder in Virginia by Suzanne Lebsock of Rutgers. It is about the murder of a white Southside Virginia farmer's wife in 1896. If Lebsock were checking off those little field boxes at the University of Michigan, I'm sure that she'd be coded as one of those historians of gender and ethnic studies. But, lord, the range of material she covers, the range of questions she asks of it, and the skill with which she marshals difficult evidence is just astonishing. In her skillful hands, questions arising from agricultural history, legal history, and political history are raised as forcefully and tellingly as issues arising from concerns about gender and ethnicity.
I cite Lebsock as an example of a historian who transcends the little field boxes and skillfully probes the issues from many perspectives. In the process, she convinced me that her little murder case occurred at a critical moment in Southern political history and that we learn a great deal by simply teasing out the connections and implications for a whole variety of subjects. That's where I think Tim's argument for the historian as generalist is most persuasive. When you see the best of them at work, it is awesome.