Where Am I?

In the last paragraph of his essay on "The Present and Future of Intellectual History," Daniel Wickberg observes, "We have yet to have a really good history of American intellectual history, one that explains how we got where we are, how much our approaches are indebted to those of the past and the assumptions they made, and how much we have departed from them."  

What I find most interesting about this statement is not the claim it makes about the need for a history of the field, but the way that it frames an epistemic problem in spatial terms.  We need to understand where we are.  Our methodological and theoretical commitments are approaches, and they may retrace older routes to knowledge or depart from them.  

Similarly, in his reflection on the role this blog might play in the future of intellectual history, Ray Haberski writes, "This is a place where intellectual historians (emerging and emerged) offer a body of work to be discussed by graduate students and senior scholars without pretense that they serve as an official organ for the field" (emphasis mine).

I draw attention to this language not because it is jarring, but because it is utterly unremarkable. 

It is seems perfectly natural to conceptualize thinking and knowing in spatial terms.  Indeed, the sense of space is implicit in the idea of a "field" -- it is a conceptual territory with contested boundaries that allow us to define what is a proper subject of inquiry, and who is properly authorized to make such inquiries.  

This is the dual purpose of field exams in a PhD program -- mapping the terrain and vetting its custodians.  Professors may joke that there is an element of hazing involved in the process, but I'm afraid they're also telling the truth.  I'll find out for myself next year when I take my qualifying exams.  I am not looking forward to it.  

To "look forward" to the future is to conceive of the temporal in particularly linear directional terms.  Indeed, this way of thinking about time is the conceptual foundation for both whiggish history and its dour doppelgänger, the narrative of declension.  It is, I suppose, the conceptual foundation for the Western idea of history, period.  

And what is a "conceptual foundation," but a metaphor for knowledge-as-edifice?   Like the concept of a "field," the concept of knowledge as something that is "built" has proved a serviceable metaphor for understanding this scholarly enterprise in which professional historians are engaged.   In That Noble Dream, Peter Novick characterizes the beginnings of professional history in America as an era of "brick-making," an image borrowed from the public writing and private correspondence of J. Franklin Jameson, the founding editor of the American Historical Review.  Novick writes, 

This conception of the historian's task -- the patient manufacture of four-square factualist bricks to be fitted together in the ultimate objective history -- had enormous professional advantages.  It offered an almost tangible image of steady, cumulative progress.  Although creating a grand synthesis might require an architectonic vision, almost anyone, properly trained, could mold a brick: worthwhile employment in making a contribution to the edifice was thus guaranteed to those of the most modest endowments.*

The historian as a brick-maker tasked with converting the (presumed) raw material of the past into useable pieces of "objective" knowledge to be fitted together in a collective building enterprise has mostly been discarded, at least in theory.  Instead, thanks to Theory, we have a way of stepping back from this enterprise and thinking of historical knowledge (and any other kind, for that matter) less as a given structure than as a posited construct. 

Yet behind and beneath these two seemingly different ideas stands the same basic metaphor:  knowledge is something we build together.  

But where?

Peter Novick ends That Noble Dream with a chapter titled, "There was no king in Israel."  This phrase is lifted from the last verse of the biblical Book of Judges:  

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

This verse serves for Novick as a fitting epigraph for the discordant and chaotic practice of history in a post-consensus, post-objectivity era.  But quoting this verse from Judges is also a cunning, punning invocation of Carl Becker's 1931 AHA Presidential address, "Everyman His Own Historian."  Becker was talking about "Mr. Everyman," not "every man."  As the AHA website notes, Becker's call for a pragmatic, pluralistic (or, for some, relativistic) approach to history has been interpreted by some as a call for "greater modesty in interpretation" of the past.  Nevertheless, that call for modesty was anything but modest in its bold swipe at the foundations of the brick-making, brick-laying enterprise of professional history.  It must have sounded positively destructive to some.

Similarly, some read Novick's book as a narrative of declension, and perhaps Novick himself viewed the story he was telling in that light.  But the "present" moment Novick described in 1988 -- a moment of cacophonous dissensus -- was also a moment of disciplinary creativity.  Look at the Bancroft winners for the decade following the publication of Novick's masterpiece, and all the Bancroft winers since.**  This is the scholarship that came from or came of age amidst that age of fracture, that babel of voices.

Perhaps, then, I might be excused for imaginatively situating the field -- or, perhaps, the construction site -- of U.S. intellectual history not in the land of Canaan during the time of Judges, nor in the land of Egypt during the years of bondage, but on the broad plains of Mesopatamia in the mythic age between Noah and Abraham.    Though the gods have already come down once or twice to confound our speech, there is no guarantee that they will not come again.  And the more we sound alike, the more we speak the same language -- or believe that we do -- the more nervous we ought to be.  

So, between Daniel Wickberg and James Livingston and Daniel Rodgers and David Hollinger and Andrew Hartman and Bill Fine and Ray Haberski and David Sehat and Charles Capper -- not to mention, as David Hall wryly notes in his MIH essay, "the occasional woman"*** -- I think we're good...for now.

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*Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge UP, 1988), 56.

**Never mind Bellesiles.

***David D. Hall, "Backwards to the Future: The Cultural Turn and the Wisdom of Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2012), 176.

The Good Book

During MSNBC's coverage of the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address this past January 24, Rachel Maddow took issue with Gov. Mitch Daniels's description of America as  the "shining city on the hill."  She was irked by what she sees as a spurious addition to John Winthrop's famous metaphor from his 1630 sermon aboard the Arabella:  "...for wee must Consider that wee shall  be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us."*

What bothered Maddow was the presence of the word "shining," a word that does not appear in Winthrop's phrasing. 

"We are going take a quick break," Maddow said at the end of her segment with Chris Matthews. "The city on the hill will not be shining when we come back. It doesn't need to shine. John Winthrop just talked about it being up there, in the eyes of the world upon it. That was it. Shining thing was a late addition. I'm sorry. Bugs me. Up next, we'll be talking with Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Obama. We'll be right back. It's not shining. It's not."

That "late addition" to which Maddow referred is found in Ronald Reagan's deployment of the "city on a hill" metaphor at the end of his November 1979 speech announcing his intent to seek the Republican nomination.  In his closing remarks, Reagan invoked Winthrop's address aboard the Arabella and repurposed the metaphor for his own candidacy as a "rendezvous with destiny":

We who are privileged to be Americans have had a rendezvous with destiny since the moment in 1630 when John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the tiny Arabella off the coast of Massachusetts, told the little band of pilgrims, “We shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.” 

A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and—above all—responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.

For her part, Maddow seemed to be piqued that Reagan's "shining city on a hill," a go-to metaphor for Republican politicians ever since, represents not merely an addition to Winthrop's phrasing but also a distortion of Winthrop's meaning.

Clearly, Rachel Maddow does not know her Bible.

John Winthrop's metaphor is taken from a passage found in Matthew's version of the "Sermon on the Mount," in which Jesus talks to his disciples about letting their light shine:

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.  (Matt. 5:14-16)

Winthrop's hearers, well-versed in the Bible, would have immediately recognized his metaphor and just as immediately associated it with its scriptural context and connotations. For them, the "City upon a Hill" was implicitly shining -- as it was for the "Moral majority" voters of the 1980s who apparently responded very well to this scriptural reframing of American exceptionalism.

My point here is not that Maddow is somehow incorrect to point out that John Winthrop didn't describe the City as "shining."  Of course she is correct.  But her point is politically irrelevant.  Most Americans probably don't connect this phrase to John Winthrop at all, and pointing out that he didn't say the City was shining will not in any way affect how this modified metaphor resonates with many who hear it.  The "shining city on a hill" will continue to make an appearance in American political rhetoric because it evokes a familiar text that remains as central to the lives of many Americans today as it was to the lives of the Puritans aboard the Arabella.

There is no single text or set of texts that has been more influential in American intellectual history than the Bible.  The (Protestant) Christian scriptures have shaped the political, cultural, social, and intellectual discourse in the U.S. since its colonial days.  Yes, there are other equally crucial influences -- but none more influential than the Bible. 

The Bible is a key primary text for U.S. intellectual history.  It has been read, re-read, misread, used, misused, repurposed and used again, quoted and misquoted, revered and reviled, throughout American history, by a fairly sizable number of Americans.  However its meanings have been construed at different moments, by different groups of people, the Bible -- not merely its theological content or narrative incidents but its very language -- has persisted as an integral part of the conceptual framework within which American thought continues to take shape. 

Am I suggesting that it is necessary for a U.S. intellectual historian to be familiar with the Bible?  No.  But it couldn't hurt.  Indeed, it could be quite helpful.  If what we are about is understanding the sense that people have made of their world, and the underlying sensibility from which that meaning-making emerges, we really need to pay attention to the texts and the ideas that were important to them and to the world within which (and sometimes against which) they lived -- not just what those texts were, but what those texts said, and what those people used the texts to say.

Those of us who were (un)fortunate enough to grow up going to Sunday School and Children's Church (and Bible Study and Prayer Group and Vacation Bible School, ad infinitum, ad nauseum) are at an advantage here.  It is beyond easy for someone like me to read William Lloyd Garrison or William James, W.E.B. DuBois or Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Addams or Henry Luce, and recognize when and how they are invoking the language of scripture, and to what rhetorical effect.  I don't need footnotes to tell me the source of their phrasing or the meaning of their allusions.  This is a real boon when it comes to understanding the ideas at play in a particular text and placing that thought within a larger context. 

Don't get me wrong:  the idea of sitting down to read the Bible is no more pleasant for me than it might be for someone who was not brought up to know it backwards and forwards.  In fact, it's probably a good deal less pleasant for me than it would be for those who can approach the text without quite so much, well, history.   Nevertheless, the durability and ubiquity of the Bible as a common cultural referent throughout American history -- a source and resource of thought accessible and appropriated across lines of race, class and gender -- combined with its plasticity as a text from which multiple meanings have been shaped and reshaped at each new moment in American thought, should make it an indispensable primary source for U.S. intellectual historians.

So, brothers and sisters, I urge you -- certainly not by the mercies of God, but rather by the exigencies of doing first-rate U.S. intellectual history -- to bite the bullet, take your medicine, and read your Bible.



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*Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity," in Hollinger and Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 6-15 (p. 15).