Historians and History-at-the-Movies

As an historian interested in film history, I've often been frustrated with the ways in which historians have tended to use history films in the classroom and to discuss them in the public sphere. 

I tend to use movies in the classroom as primary source materials, e.g., I show films made in the 1930s to teach about the 1930s.  Films can be wonderful when used this way.  Students tend to already be more sophisticated consumers of motion pictures than they are of most other kinds of primary source material.  A well-chosen film can teach us both about its subject and about the way films themselves were made and consumed at the time of its creation. Using films in this way is, of course, a luxury available to those of us who teach courses about the last 120 years or so.

Most historians, however, teach about earlier periods.  And if they use films in the classroom, it's usually as secondary sources, e.g. screening a film like Black Robe to teach about French interactions with Native Americans in the 17th century.  Films used as secondary sources in the classroom share one big feature with films used as primary sources in the classroom: students by and large prefer viewing motion pictures to reading books. But many of the things that recommend primary-source classroom films make secondary-source classroom films problematic.  For example, Black Robe is a pretty complicated and interesting portrait of Native American life, especially for a mainstream narrative film. But as a product of the early 1990s, it no doubt bares the marks both of that era of filmmaking and that era (or possibly earlier eras) of historiography.  And, of course, Black Robe wasn't filmed to be used as a textbook manqué, but rather to be a piece of narrative entertainment. Reading Black Robe in its cultural context is thus necessary, but doing so takes us far away from 17th-century Quebec.

Perhaps this latter use of films in the classroom helps explain the dominant way in which (non film-) historians have tended to write for the general public about history films.  When dealing with films about the past, historians have tended, first and foremost, to fact-check them. Indeed, volumes and websites have been dedicated to separating "reel history" from "real history" (a pun that ought to be retired, btw). 


I have long felt that such an approach to history films was problematic because of its unwillingness to seriously grapple with history films as a filmic genre.  And, especially in the last two decades, historians interested in studying film have taken more sophisticated approaches to studying history films.

But recent discussions of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Oliver Stone's Showtime documentary series, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, have highlighted another weakness of historians' fact-checking approach to movies: it does a terrible job conveying to the public what it means to do history.*

Spielberg and Stone have devoted much of their careers to putting American history on film. And though both have (often ostentatiously) employed professional historians to validate their films' take on the past, they have positioned themselves rather differently in relation to the historical mainstream. By and large, Spielberg's history films have tended to reflect the mainstream scholarly consensus about the past; Stone's have tended to be openly iconoclastic and revisionist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, academic historians have tended to prefer Spielberg's films (at least as works of history) to Stone's.

Lincoln, as far as I can tell from reading about the film, fact-checks well. But as any historian would tell you, getting the facts right, while necessary for doing good history, is not sufficient. It is perfectly possible to construct an historical narrative which is accurate, but misleading.  Historians are responsible not only for getting the facts right, but for selecting which facts are significant and constructing explanations for why things happened as they did.  Non-historians are often unaware of--or even downright hostile to--this aspect of the historical craft.**

While a number of historians have praised Lincoln, which focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment, others have objected to the way it frames the story of emancipation entirely through the actions of European Americans, while reducing African Americans to the status of onlookers.  Prof. Kate Masur, of Northwestern University, published an editorial in the New York Times on November 12 that made this case.  And academic bloggers (and friends of this blog) Corey Robin and Aaron Bady have launched similar criticisms of the film.  All are well worth reading (as are most other things written by Robin and Bady).  But I was particularly struck by the comment thread on Corey's post on Crooked Timber.

As most readers of this blog know, Crooked Timber is an eclectic academic blog that reaches an audience that extends well beyond the academy.***   What's interesting about the comment thread on Corey's post is how many respondents don't quite get why some historians (and historically-oriented social scientists like Robin) object to Lincoln.

Some examples:

EMS:  "I’m astonished, though, and rather disgusted that any would criticize this film because there weren’t enough blacks in it, or that black agency in their own emancipation seems to have been omitted. This reminds me of a huge fight I had with my wife over “Tell ‘Em Willie Boy was Here” when she accused Polonsky of anti-feminism, despite the fact the film took place way the hell before there was any such thing as Feminism (except in a few small Eastern precincts). It’s about Lincoln and the 13th amendment. Why the hell should any blacks be in it at all? One could, probably with some force, argue that Spielberg and Kushner are guilty of tokenism. I’d argue it’s just bad film-making. Does every film have to be judged by the inclusion or exclusion of blacks? How about The Red Badge of Courage? Ya wanna make that one all black? One can dislike the choices Spielberg makes, but he’s about emotion more than historical accuracy. What he’s not is a profound thinker. What he is, usually, anyway, is a superior craftsman."

Bloix: "I know all about history from the bottom up, but I believe that there are great people whose acts turned the course of history. Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Their stories are great stories that deserve to be told over and over again, in every era, in every form of art."

Dave: "It may not be the constraints of history or genre driving Spielberg’s choices, but presumably culture as it is presently configured and the master-narrative of the period preclude the possibility of Spielberg telling the kind of story Corey would like. At least, it’s as likely as 'Spielberg’s blinkered vision.' There is no pop culture artifact anywhere telling that story; why be outraged at Spielberg for failing to account for an academic history when no one else does?"

Mark Field: "I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was excellent. I’m not much impressed by this criticism. There are thousands of stories that could be told about the war and about emancipation. There are stories of Thaddeus Stevens, of Frederick Douglas, of millions of unidentified slaves, of Union generals, etc. No movie can easily incorporate them all. And it’s not as if Lincoln was peripheral to the story, not then and not in historical memory.
"The fact that Spielberg chose to tell one of these stories — one which fits well the nature of film — doesn’t strike me as anything worth criticizing. It just means there are lots more (good) movies to make."

Harold:  "Masur is silly (not for the first time). Tony Kushner made a decision to restrict the story to a time period of two months in the interest of narrative economy, and it worked."

Two thoughts about these (and many other similar) comments:

One repeated trope among Lincoln's defenders in the CT commentariat is the contrast between the requirements of a movie and the requirements of history (or, more specifically, academic history).   This line of reasoning is correct...so far as it goes. To the extent that historians expect or want historical dramas to look exactly like academic history, we are bound to be disappointed. And, as I've said above, in the past, many of us have not been careful enough about distinguishing the requirements of one from the requirements of the other.  But the fact that a Hollywood historical drama is not a work of academic history does not--and should not--shield it from criticism from the perspective of academic history. Though those of us who seek to criticize a work like Lincoln need to bear in mind what those differences are...and perhaps even foreground them in our criticisms.

This leads to my second thought about these comments: just as, in the past, historians have not always been very sophisticated in the way we treat Hollywood's attempts at telling historical stories, we have also not been very effective at explaining to the public what it is we do and what we expect from works of public history (broadly understood).  The crude role of fact-checker nicely fits the public's conception of us as nothing more or less than fonts of knowledge about what happened in the past.  But it is in our capacity as interpreters of the past that we have the most interesting things to say about Hollywood's historical fictions.  If we don't understand the rather complicated, shifting generic expectations of the historical film, and the various tasks it performs beyond informing its audience about its historical subject, we will not be able to grapple with historical films successfully as interpretations of the past. And if the public doesn't understand what it means to interpret the past, or even that any historical narrative necessarily entails a series of interpretations, our public interventions are likely to be misunderstood or dismissed.


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* I'm not addressing my own opinions on Lincoln or Untold History in this post for a very simple reason: I haven't seen either of them yet.  Most of this post concerns reactions to Lincoln, but for a good example of a take on Untold History that takes an unsubtle approach to Stone's take on history, see this piece from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

** Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) at the 1995 Senate hearings into the Smithsonian's proposed Enola Gay exhibit:  "[I]s it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts...? ...I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text... was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis..."

*** Like Spinal Tap's, our appeal is more selective.

Gender and Intellectual History

by Brian M. Ingrassia

Recently I have been thinking about gender and intellectual history.  Without going into all the details, this reflection was prompted by Lauren Kientz Anderson’s post of October 31, in which she referred to her (perhaps) “infamous” post from last year on women in intellectual history. After rereading that 2011 piece—and the 47 comments it generated!—I started asking myself a few questions.  These are not necessarily new questions, but it might help to air them in one place and ponder their implications. First of all, why does it seem that relatively few women (compared to men) identify with the field? Second, is there something inherently “male” about the field? And a third, much bigger question: What is intellectual history, why do we do it, and what bearing might the answer to this question have upon the field’s ability to incorporate analysis of women and gender?

Regarding the first question, I posit a practical answer that at least one commentator has already suggested.  While there certainly are women historians who do intellectual history—especially the intellectual history of women, gender, or feminism—many (though not all) tend to identify, or be identified, as historians of women or gender. Of course, they use intellectual history methods primarily as a way to understand the place of women and gender in society more broadly, not necessarily as a way to understand only "intellectuals," whether male or female.  In addition, there are practical incentives for scholars (many of whom are women) who study the intellectual history of women or gender to identify as historians of those fields rather than as intellectual historians. Quite frankly, there are many fewer academic positions in intellectual history than there are in women’s and gender history.  In the current academic job market, a young scholar has little or no reason to identify as an intellectual historian when s/he could identify as a scholar of a more professionally viable field such as women’s or gender history.

Regarding the second question, I do not think that intellectual history is inherently a “male” field—nor is it simply a place where men who reject gender or race analysis go for affirmation. Speaking from personal experience, I am a male who embraces gender and race analysis, yet I still think that it is important to study intellectual history. Nevertheless, there may be a grain of truth to the perception that intellectual history is for men because it is about men. Consider the obvious: in many historical contexts, especially before the twentieth century, very few women were considered intellectuals. To study the intellectual history of many time periods, one must focus largely, if not exclusively, upon men who were in a position to construct and disseminate discourses that were perceived as “intellectual” in nature. For those interested in the history of women and gender—including many female historians—this may not seem to be a worthwhile project, since it is just reinforcing androcentric models rather than critiquing or challenging them.

This is where things get thornier, and where I start to ask that third question. What is intellectual history? A few days ago, one guest blogger noted that we analyze the “history of ideas.” That may be a good definition of what intellectual historians do, but I think it compels us to ask more questions. Which ideas—whose ideas—do we analyze? Do we merely seek to understand ideas that were consciously appreciated as ideas in the times and places in which they were created? Or should we seek to understand the ideas of a number of different groups or individuals—including women—even if they were not necessarily seen as intellectuals within their own historical context?

If we define intellectual history as the history of ideas that were perceived as part of an avowedly intellectualdiscourse in their time and place of creation, then in many cases we have to restrict our analyses to male subjects. But if we interpret the field more broadly, then the methodology of intellectual history can be applied in many different contexts.  I will never forget the day in 2002 when one of my professors at Illinois—a prominent practitioner of the “New Social History”—propped his feet up on his desk and told a first year graduate student interested in intellectual history (me) that someday a historian would find a way to write the intellectual history of sanitation workers (i.e., the ideas of “garbage men”). Ever since that day, I have found his suggestion to be a fascinating one, and if I could only find the primary sources I might write such a study!

I suspect, though, that at least some of us would be turned off by this idea, or would suggest a caveat: If we write the intellectual history of sanitation workers, then we would have less time or energy to devote to those individuals who were consciously focused on the life of the mind.  On a related note, I suspect that maybe a couple of folks might (quietly) say something similar about studying the intellectual history of women: it’s interesting and important, but it could take our energy away from studying those individuals who were considered intellectuals within their historical context and thus shaped the most prominent discourses of their time and place.

So why do we do intellectual history? Is it so that we can understand how prominent individuals (academics, theologians, statesmen, cultural critics, and so on) shaped predominant discourses? Or is it so that we can understand how the ideas of diverse individuals or groups developed and changed over time?  We might frame this as an issue of canon—of whether or not we draw boundaries around the parameters of the field. Furthermore, how do we approach the history of ideas? Do we first strive to understand the inner logic of ideas and then place them in historical context, or do we strive to show how historical context has caused certain ideas (and not others) to emerge in a particular time and place?  The latter approach, I would note, is much friendlier to an analytical framework that consciously critiques categories such as gender, race, and/or class.

In short, is intellectual history a field that studies intellectuals, or is it a methodology that studies the history of ideas generated in many different cultural and social contexts?  In all honesty, I do not think that these are mutually exclusive categories—and many of us have probably pursued either at one time or another. Nevertheless, it is helpful to think about why we do what we do. And, admittedly, we should note that there are strengths and weaknesses to either approach. On the one hand, if intellectual history is a subject field that studies prominent idea creators (“intellectuals”), then it may be a more coherent field even though it will probably have less relevance for those scholars (especially women) who are interested in fields such as the history of women and gender. On the other hand, if intellectual history is primarily a methodology, then it may have larger utility to a wider variety of scholars even though its identity as a distinct, coherent field of study may be diminished.

These are just some thoughts, and I am sure I have said nothing new here.  But perhaps this will spark some interesting discussion about what we do and how that affects who identifies with this field.

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Brian M. Ingrassiateaches American history at Middle Tennessee State University.  He is the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (University Press of Kansas, 2012), as well as the new series editor of the Sport and Popular Culture Series at the University of Tennessee Press.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

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It's nautical metaphor week here at the U.S. Intellectual History blog. 

Ray Haberski set the course with his brilliant, aptly lyrical piece on "The Albatross Concept."  Drawing from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Ray explored how the language historians use to bring an elusive idea to ground can become both a mark of distinction and a source of frustration when those historians become forever, fatefully linked to their most well-aimed turns of phrase.  I will allude to some of Ray's ideas in greater detail below.  In the meantime, I would simply say that, as blog posts go -- and sometimes they go very well indeed -- Ray's most recent offering is a star to steer by. 

Mariners also made a brief but jaunty appearance in Ben Alpers's piece about the impact that Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolution may have had on the work of intellectual historians.  "History is sometimes said to be the pirate discipline," Ben wrote, "and I have no doubt that many intellectual historians have raided the Kuhnian castle in their efforts to understand the past."  The mental image these words evoked became a source of great amusement for me.  Just picture it: David Brion Davis, Linda Kerber, Bernard Bailyn, Jill Lepore, Daniel Rodgers, Lynn Hunt, Jesse Lemisch, Joyce Appleby, David Hollinger, Joan Scott, and a motley crew of elbow-patched accomplices, cuirasses clutched in their gritted teeth, swinging from the rigging to scale the castle walls.  "Look sharp, me hearties! There be paradigms within, and dead men will tell tales!" Sign me up.

Between those two seafaring metaphors, I offered up a tangentially nautical image in response to a comment on my own post.  My figure of speech was drawn from a well-worn folk saying: picture a grad student wracked with angst about writing, about words that either don't come at all or that don't work when they do, as someone caught "between the devil and the deep blue sea."*  And, oh my, is that sea deep, and is that devil daunting! But even in jest, I shouldn't have singled out anybody to serve as my honorary Mephisto-of-the-moment...especiallya fine scholar who paid me the high compliment of saying that I had hauled up an idea worth using. A kind word like that ought to serve as wind to my sails.  But here I sit, dead in the water, and not even an albatross to show for it.

And make no mistake:  I need an albatross.  In academe, we all do.  In fact, we need a whole brace of them:  dissertation, journal article, first book, tenure book, promotion book.  Bag 'em and tag 'em.  

I think this is why some of us balk sometimes at the blank page:  we see ideas almost as living things, and pinning them down can seem a bloody business.  I think the more conscious we are of the life and liveliness of ideas, the harder intellectual work becomes.  We know that ideas are "in the air" -- but not like some inert atmospheric substance that people breathe in unawares, nor even like some materialistic wind whose mechanical movement marks and makes a culture's or an era's will.  Instead, we see that ideas take wing and move with a will of their own.  And yet we believe that we must master them -- that we must, contra Jim Livingston, assert our "cognitive autonomy" as individual rational agents, as authorial selves.

As intellectual historians, we may very well need to think of authors and authorship as Foucault does, but we dare not see ourselves in such a light -- I dare not, anyhow.  I can only think of the "I" who writes as an after-effect of the text after I've already written the text.  Otherwise, it's water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink ideas, ideas everywhere, and not a thought to think. When I'm facing the blank page, I have to believe in the fiction of the independent authorial consciousness, or I won't be able to write one. damn. word.  (Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!)

Academic work depends upon this fiction of the thinker who precedes the thought, and we acknowledge amongst ourselves this professional trick of epistemic prestidigitation.  We are aware that we discover and develop our ideas in conversation -- this blog is one place where that can happen, at least for me. And we do in fact footnote each other, and gladly so.  The academy is social, associative, collaborative, and we affirm this community of discourse every time we credit another scholar for work that has informed our own.  But we do so knowing all the while that we can no more give credit than we can take credit.   Where does any thought begin?  For every time we dare to think that we have called some new thought into being by the power of language, we might end up recognizing that we are simply giving a name to something that was already there, and present in some way to all of us. We are the servants of each other's thoughts.

If, as Ray suggests, "civil religion" is an albatross around Bellah's neck, what makes the term so burdensome may be the expectation it confers upon Bellah to exemplify the necessary fiction of the individual thinker.  Ray notes that "Bellah's deployment of civil religion struck a particular chord with scholars because, it seems to me, he summarized ideas and sensibilities that were swirling around his era."  Similarly, Ray suggests that George Kennan's claim to fame -- "containment" -- reflects "his ability to bring together streams of thought that had been circulating throughout the upper levels of government and intellectual life; he provided eloquence and clarity to ideas that would have existed in disparate ways without him."   Ray is not saying that just anybody could have hit upon the term that Bellah used or that Kennan deployed.  We all aim to put thought into words, but not everyone is such an able marksman.  (At this point, I'd be glad to hit a bell jar with a river rock from five yards back.)  These two marksmen, Bellah and Kennan, took aim at some ideas that were "in the air" and brought them within our reach.  

As academics and as writers, that is our work:  to bring ideas within reach.  We do this so that other people can take those ideas up and shape them -- or be shaped by them -- in turn. As scholars, as the originators of texts, we get our work done by constantly asserting a proprietary -- an authorial -- claim that we know better than to really believe. Though we may write (or not!) in solitude, we do not sail the seas alone.  In some way, every idea we have comes to us from and through the company we keep.  We are all on the same ship, we are all looking up into the same bright sky filled with wondrous, winged things.

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*If you want to listen to the 1931 Harold Arlen song, I'd recommend this 1961 cover by Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, I'd recommend Ella Fitzgerald's cover of pretty much any song.

Has Intellectual History Had a Kuhnian Revolution?

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book which clearly belongs on any list of the most significant historical works of the twentieth century.  Over the weekend, the UK's The Observer featured an excellent journalistic account by John Naughton of the significance of Kuhn's book, both within the history of science and in the wider sphere of (at least educated Anglophone) culture, which got me thinking both about my encounters with the book (and Kuhn) and about the place of Kuhn's vision of of the past in intellectual history beyond the history of science.

I first read Structure as a first-semester freshman in Science A17, the first half of Owen Gingerich's history of science survey course that, as part of Harvard's Core Curriculum, was a direct heir to the Gen Ed science course whose formulation had led Thomas Kuhn from physics to the history of science and to the metahistorical revolution embodied in his book.


Usually one encounters a famous book's reputation long before actually reading the book. But reading Kuhn as a first-semester freshman in the early 1980s, I had absolutely no preconceptions.  I had no idea of the book's significance within its field. And the explosion of paradigm talk in the wider culture had yet to occur. So my sense of wonder at reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was relatively unmediated (though, of course, the fact that it was being assigned and discussed in a class was itself a form of mediation).  It was, I think, one of the first times that I experienced how a work of history can fundamentally change the way one understands the world, not simply through revealing what happened in the past, but also through its critical understanding of what happened in the past.  And, like many others who encounter Kuhn for the first time, I and my classmates began busily applying the idea of paradigm shifts to realms beyond science.  I remember my section leader cautioning us that Kuhn himself was very insistent that his idea of scientific change applied only to science.  That made us slow, but not stop, our excited, undergraduate Kuhnification of everything.

Sometime during my senior year I found myself at a reception with Thomas Kuhn himself.  It was, I think, a celebration of some anniversary of the Harvard Society of Fellows, of which Kuhn was a particularly notable alumnus (and with which I, it should be said, have never had a direct affiliation).  I spent much of the reception trying to work up the nerve to talk to Kuhn, who had really made an enormous intellectual difference to me, but I could never figure out what I might say to him.*

Kuhn's direct impact on the rest of my college education was slight (I took only one other history of science class), but his name frequently showed up in reviews of recent works in the history of science that I read during those years in various periodicals. I was struck both by the hostility with which many philosophers of science and scientists treated Kuhn, and by the tendency to dismiss him as an epistemic relativist. The latter was a charge that particularly puzzled me, as Kuhn's understanding of scientific revolutions relies on the appearance of anomalies in the results of "normal science" to trigger a paradigm shift.  It seemed to me that a theory-independent reality was necessary to generate those anomalies.

As John Naughton notes in his Observer article, in the ensuing decades, Kuhn--or at least Kuhn-speak--has spread throughout the culture...though it's an interesting question why this is the case and whether popular talk of "paradigm shifts" suggests real Kuhnian influence or just the shallow importation of a piece of jargon, rather like Gramsci's rising popularity in the '70s and '80s made "hegemony" a common word without actually suggesting that its users were notably Gramscian.

Certainly the rise of paradigm-talk has helped cement the book's status as a key, late 20th-century text, well beyond the history of science.  While I expect that we'll see many changes to the latter chapters of Hollinger & Capper's American Intellectual Tradition, the excerpt from Structure has a very secure place in the volume, not least because it's a fine, early example of the postmodern turn in American thought.

All of which brings me to the question posed in the post's title: what has been the impact of Kuhn on the practice of intellectual history?  Of course, that title has something of a double-meaning. It might also be read as: does the practice of intellectual history undergo Kuhnian paradigm shifts?

I actually think that this second question is easier to answer than the first: Kuhn's vision of the practice of science seems radically unlike the way intellectual history is practiced.  In Kuhn's view, "normal science" consists of problem solving within a paradigm, until anomalies in the results build up to the point that a revolutionary paradigm shift needs to take place. Under normal science, the paradigm within which science works is not only unquestioned, but in effect unquestionable.  And the new paradigm is, according to Kuhn, incommensurable with the old paradigm, hence the need for a revolutionary leap.**

This all seems very unlike the way historians (and most other humanists) work. In particular, the stark division between "normal science" and a scientific revolution simply doesn't exist. Yes, we can all think of plodding bits of archival work that do nothing but add a further example to an established historical story. And works that truly alter our sense of how historical change takes place are few and far between. But, in principle at least, our narratives, our metanarratives, even our most basic methodology are all always up for grabs.  We don't need a single stable paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) in which to work. Nor is it possible to claim that our paradigms (in the looser, popular sense) are in any way incommensurable with each other. Indeed, much of the most vibrant activity in history involves paradigms (in this looser sense) facing off against each other.***

But if intellectual history itself doesn't quite fit the Kuhnian, er, paradigm, perhaps what we study might.  Interestingly enough, at the very moment that Kuhn was (if you'll pardon the expression) revolutionizing the history of science, a parallel revolution of sorts was going on in intellectual history: the rise of the Cambridge School.  This is not the time or place to enter into a close comparison of Kuhn and Pocock, so I'll just note that it seems to me that their visions of historical change--and historical study--are quite distinct from one another, yet clearly emerge from the same broader intellectual moment.****

History is sometimes said to be the pirate discipline, and I have no doubt that many intellectual historians have raided the Kuhnian castle in their efforts to understand the past. But I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I can't think of any really successful attempt to write a strictly Kuhnian history of any non-scientific aspect of thought. Back in 1997, Adolph Reed, Jr., wrote critically of what he believed were misplaced attempts to write about African American thought in a Kuhnian way [h/t to Lauren Kientz Anderson for drawing my attention to that Reed piece].  And though Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions played an absolutely central role in my admittedly modest intellectual biography, I cannot honestly say that I pattern my own thinking consciously after his ideas (though I'm sure that he contributed to my--and my generation of historians'--general suspicion of historiographical Whiggishness).

Was Kuhn an influence on your development as an historian? Is he an influence on the way you think and/or write about the past?  What works of intellectual history (outside of the history of science) seem to you to be most influenced by Kuhn?

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* The only other person I can think of around whom I was similarly utterly tongue tied was Tom Lehrer, with whom I was at another reception that same year. 

** The Marxian notion of revolution is, of course, a very important intellectual context for the Kuhnian notion of a scientific revolution (a phrase which had previously been used to describe a single, particular moment in the history of science in a not-particularly-Marxian way).

*** I should add that the idea of the incommensurability of paradigms remains one of the most controversial aspects of Kuhn's thesis.

**** In the early days of this blog, Tim Lacy drew some interesting parallels between John C. Greene's 1957 essay on "Objectives and Methods in Intellectual History" and Kuhn's work.

What the Hell

A few weeks ago, this blog published Jim Livingston's savage critique of Paul Murphy's new book.  The critique was part of a roundtable organized by Tim Lacy, our outgoing book review editor.  I am our current book review editor.  When I read Livingston's piece, I thought, What the hell have I gotten myself into?

I wasn't just wondering about the book review editing gig, or doubting the wisdom of the blogging gig (from which I was taking a working break).  What I really had in mind was the entire field and practice of U.S. intellectual history. 

That review scared me to death.  It was a hit job; I mean, it was a frickin' crime scene.  I was stunned, shocked into silence -- sure that I had witnessed something awful and wrong, but afraid to say a thing about it publicly.  I did write Jim Livingston privately about it, but I didn't say a thing on this blog. 

Nobody did.  The whole day that review just sat there, drawing traffic like crazy, and generating who knows what back-channel conversations -- but eliciting not a single remark from any of us, all day long.  Then at three in the morning on the day after the essay went up, a blog commenter I hadn't seen in this space before remarked (in a way) on our collective spectatorial silence, but said nothing about the spectacle itself:  a senior historian practically eviscerating a junior scholar.

Finally, the day after the review went up, Dan Wickberg took Livingston on.  I saw Wickberg's name in the sidebar, and I thought, "Thank God; we're off the hook.  The Cavalry has arrived."  If anybody exemplifies both intellectual rigor and professional comity, it is Dan Wickberg. If anybody were to speak with unquestionable authority and unwavering collegiality, I knew that Dan would be the one to do it.

Then I came to the closing lines of his comment:

"Instead of farting in the museum, give us a careful and considered argument. We're all adults here; I think we can handle it."

I could not believe my eyes.  Farting in the museum?  Dan Wickberg wrote this?

What the hell!


But of course, when I re-read the whole comment, it made perfect sense, and I could see exactly what Wickberg was trying to do.  He was basically asserting that Livingston's critique amounted to a bit of adolescent behavior meant to shock the priggish, stuffy, dusty old traditional profession of intellectual history.  By starting his comment with an offhanded "oh, hell," and ending it with a nonchalant reference to "farting in the museum" (something, alas, I will never be able to un-read), Wickberg was attempting to demonstrate that if Livingston's "screed" is falling on deaf ears, it's not because historians are scandalized by his potty-mouthed language.  It's because he's not making a convincing argument.

But if you don't bring a knife to a gun fight, I guess you don't bring a fart to a shit-slinging contest.  Livingston's reply to Wickberg's charge of "farting in the museum" was an affectionate and admiring "fuck you."

"What the hell," I thought.  "He did NOT just say that."

It's not that I was scandalized or even surprised by Livingston's reply.  (It's not that I wasn't ever so slightly amused by it, either.)  Instead, I was disappointed. I wanted to hear the argument that Dan had invited him to make.

So I wrote Jim and told him that he blew it; he missed an opportunity to make his case to someone who represents the profession in a way that is open to critique and willing to take Livingston's ideas seriously. 

"You have to admit," I wrote, "he rolled out the red carpet for you to deliver a damning indictment of the whole discipline.  A scathing Jeremiad.  But you have too much of the Prophet Ezekiel about you today.  But whenever you're ready to write a guest post, let me know."

I am very pleased to say that Jim Livingston took me up on my offer.  He has written a thoughtful essay that is predictably provocative, but perhaps profitably so as well. 

It's not a scathing jeremiad, nor is it the cryptic musing of a prophet too easily mistaken for a madman.  In this essay, which will be published here on the blog on Thursday, Livingston revisits and to a certain extent revises his earlier critique of Paul Murphy's book.  He does so as part of an insightful meditation on the practice and purpose of doing history.  Indeed, to call this piece a "historiographic essay" doesn't quite do it justice.  Such a description gets at the genre but not the gist, the type but not the tone.  Livingston's essay is historiographical, and then some -- it is an inescapably elegiac homage to the historical profession, a profession that must not be content with writing elegies.

The Fracas

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been working through the historiography/theory section of my exam reading list.  I am on the home stretch -- finished Haskell and Wickberg yesterday, with only Megill and Klein to go.  I hope to turn the last page of Klein by the middle of next week, if not before.

What I am most enjoying about this section of my reading list, especially these texts published since the mid-80s, is the way historians routinely and collegially challenge each other's assumptions and interpretations.  Novick defines an objectivity that never existed and proceeds to objectively (for the most part) explore its fall from favor. Haskell takes Novick to task for confusing objectivity with neutrality.  Haskell takes White to task for (among other things) eschewing revolutions even as he calls for revolutionary historiography.  Wickberg takes Haskell to task for exploring the causes of the "humanitarian sensibility" without exploring the sensibility. 

This whole section of my list illustrates very well the dynamic that Haskell describes in some his essays on the professionalization of the academy, the emergence of disciplines, and the epistemological ground of academic freedom.  In Haskell's reading, the Peircean community of the competent is collegially competitive, a "miniature market":

It is a market in which people compete not for money, but for the affective currency of criticism: fame instead of disgrace; honor in place of shame; compliments, not complaints, about the technical worth of one's work. What each competitor strives to accumulate in this special "countervailing" market is not capital, but reputation, a stock of favorable impressions of himself and his work in the minds of his peers.  Since people do not necessarily lose self-esteem when they bestow praise on others, the competitors in this market are not playing a strictly zero-sum game, and the spirit of their competition is consequently often relaxed and friendly.  But esteem is not limitless in supply, and the deeply personal character of the productions and performances being criticized can charge the competition in this market with explosive emotional force.*

Collegiality is precisely what intensifies this "deeply personal" competition, while at the same time absorbing and channeling some of that intensity in ways that build camaraderie instead of undermining it. Says Haskell:

The community's achievement of "logical goodness" depends not only on conflict and competition but also on its members' adherence to such collegial values as honesty, a degree of tolerance (give one's own susceptibility to error), dedication to the resolution of conflicts, willingness to be persuaded by evidence, logic, and reason, and so on.**

Those "collegial values" presuppose professional standards, including the standards of membership:  who is and who is not part of the community of inquiry. These values are enforced and reinforced via the collective approval or opprobrium of the disciplinary community. 

Sometimes that defense of professional standards and values can prove problematic.  Both Haskell and Novick examine a few recent (for the 1980s) cases of community policing of professional standards:  the David Abraham case and the Sears workplace discrimination lawsuit.  Novick viewed the Abraham case as an example of professional gatekeeping run amok; for Haskell, the response of feminist historians to the testimony of Rosalind Rosenberg was a case of "intellectually indefensible"*** partisan advocacy.  It is worth noting -- and Novick and Haskell both mention the fact -- that both were "partisans" in these respective conflicts, which in some ways makes the incidents all the more suitable as examples of where the professional gets personal.

Overall, though, the discourse of the academic community is a fairly friendly fracas. Or so it appears to me now.  But the fracas may seem congenial to me only because I haven't really gotten scrappy yet.  I have yet put to forward an idea in the academy that I'm willing to fight for -- I mean, really fight.  And that's a good thing, because I'm not ready yet.  My idea isn't ready yet.  But it will be.  And part of getting myself ready for the intense competition of professional academic discourse involves a careful study of how intellectual historians argue, with perhaps the occasional sparring match on this blog.

All in good fun -- until it's My Awesome Idea on the line.

Nah, it'll still be fun.




__________________
*Thomas Haskell, "Professionalism versus Capitalism," Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 111.

**109.

***163

Paul S. Boyer (1935-2012)

The New York Times has reported the passing of Paul S. Boyer on March 17 at the age of 76.

As readers of this blog know, Boyer was one of the most important U.S. intellectual historians of his generation.   Unlike many others who have earned that title, however, I don't associate Boyer particularly with any distinctive methodological, topical, metanarrativistic, or stylistic shift in the field or sub-field. To put this another way:  I can't think of any time that I've read someone else's work and have thought "that reminds me of Boyer"... and I'm not sure what would remind me of him.

But Boyer is one of that small group of historians who wrote three books that have made a real difference to me. And in Boyer's case, they are three books on very different topics:  Salem Possessed (1974), By The Bomb's Early Light (1985), and When Time Shall Be No More (1992).




Salem Possessed, co-written with Stephen Nissenbaum, applied the tools of the (then new) social history to the case of the Salem witchcraft trials and made an ingenious, if ultimately not wholly convincing, case that the witchcraft scare could best be explained by looking at land-ownership patterns and the distribution of wealth. By the time I encountered it in grad school in the late '80s, Salem Possessed read as a kind of object lesson in both the possibilities and limitations of the kind of social history that had exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s.

But by then, Boyer had moved on to other things.  By The Bomb's Early Light was an extraordinarily well-written and fascinating look at American view of atomic weaponry and power in the years immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.*  Boyer's interest in this topic reflected his own lifelong pacifism (he had been raised in one of the traditional peace churches).  Analyzing an extraordinarily broad range of materials, the book conveys both the hopes and the fears that Americans felt about the bomb from the start.


By The Bomb's Early Light would eventually serve as a kind of preemptive strike (albeit an ultimately politically unsuccessful one) against the nonsense that befell the proposed Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian a decade later, when various politicians and veterans organizations attempted to suggest that only recently had a small group of pointed-headed revisionists questioned the goodness of the atomic bombings of Japan.  In fact, as Boyer had told us, many Americans had been skeptical and fearful of the use of atomic weaponry from very early on.

When Time Shall Be No More grew out of By The Bomb's Early Light, but concerns a seemingly very different topic: premillennial prophecy in U.S. culture since World War II.  Boyer first realized the shear scope and significance of premillennialism while working on By The Bomb's Early Light, as atomic weaponry quickly came to play a role in premillennial prophetic understandings of current events in the mid-20th century. In taking premillennialism seriously as a strain in American culture worthy of real historical attention (rather than dismissing it as a kind of cultural neurosis), When Time Shall Be No More anticipated both the enormous growth of interest in religion (and especially vernacular religion) among American historians in the last two decades and the growing interest in American conservatism.

Yet the book does not (as far as I remember; I read it when it first came out and used it several times since in a classroom setting, but haven't taken a look at it for at least five years) present itself as boldly leading American historiography in a new direction. Boyer had simply found a fascinating and important topic and chosen to write about it. And like By The Bomb's Early Light, When Time Shall Be No More has an almost effortless feel about it.  In Boyer's hands, the thought of modern premillennial Christians comes alive as historically important and intrinsically interesting in a way that is neither celebratory nor dismissive.**  The book is an excellent work of history, but also a very good read.

When thinking about great historians (I almost put "great"...and then "great historians"... in quotation marks), I think we are most often drawn to revolutionary figures in a Kuhnian sense, authors who shifted the paradigm in one way or another. I don't think Paul Boyer fits this model of historiographical greatness.

But I do think it's fair to call Boyer a great historian.  He wrote a number of significant and enduring works of history on a wide range of topics, some of which found themselves on cutting edges that had not even yet emerged when he started work on them.  Both By The Bomb's Early Light and When Time Shall Be No More are models of serious scholarship written in a way that might reach broader, non scholarly audiences; I wouldn't hesitate to recommend either one of them to non-academic friends interested in their subject matters (and in fact have recommended both to non-academics over the years).

This is a career worth remembering and celebrating.

_____________________________________________
* In between working with Nissenbaum on Salem and publishing By The Bomb'e Early Light,  Boyer wrote Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (1978), which was also a very important book at the time, but which, I'm ashamed to say, I've never read.


** The first time I taught When Time Shall Be No More, one of my students happened to have come from a premillennialist background and he found the book familiar, in certain ways, but fair, interesting, and accurate.

Why History Matters

Yesterday, at the fourth annual Graduate Student Symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas, Ben Alpers give an incredible keynote address on "The Future of the Humanities." I won't summarize his talk here, but I will summarize the audience response:  Ben rocked the house.  

After Ben spoke, I presented my own paper as part of a panel addressing the theme, "Why the Humanities Matter."  My colleagues Michele Rosen and Sara Keeth did an extraordinary job of explaining the cultural value of translation studies and literary studies.  Then it fell to me -- because I had gladly if somewhat naively volunteered to do it -- to make the case for "Why History Matters."

The actual title of my talk was more elaborate, but it was no more ambitious than the daunting task I had before me:  to explain why the study of history matters to somebody besides me, and to do so while standing next to a particularly formidable American intellectual and cultural historian, Daniel Wickberg, who moderated our panel.

I have my reasons for valuing history as I do -- and I spoke about some of those reasons yesterday.  But the argument that the study of history can enrich one's life -- and it certainly can, and it certainly has -- is not sufficient to explain what history has to offer to those outside the ivied walls of the ivory tower.

What is the cultural value of being a historian?  Why should the academy continue to train historians?  Beyond the self-perpetuation of the profession, what does that get us?

Training scholars to think historically gets us people who can wade into the contentious conversations in the public sphere while retaining -- and modeling -- some sense of irony and perhaps the faintest bit of humility about the limits of one's own understanding. We get, in other words, people who would (ideally) offer a different model of discourse besides the rhetoric of righteous indignation and moral or political absolutism that is constantly swirling around us.

That was the basic argument of my paper.  Keep in mind that I was explaining "thinking historically" to an audience of people who were coming from other disciplines in the humanities.  I used my own struggle to contextualize the radical abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison as a way of framing my discussion.  So here's a slightly revised version of part of my argument, which includes some references to discussions taking place on this blog:

This effort to suspend judgment in favor of understanding is part of what it means to "think historically."  It's hard to do.  But it is a disciplinary and self-disciplinary hallmark of historians.  This professional self-discipline, Thomas Haskell explains, "requires detachment":  the ability to "suspend or bracket one's own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers,...to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to imagine how the world appears in another's eyes, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally."[1]  And, I would argue, the most unnatural perspective of all is to recognize that our own mental conception of the world -- whether it's the idea that slavery is wrong, or the idea that historians ought to approach their subjects with some measure of detachment -- is not a timeless truth; our moral and mental conceptions are ideas, and they too have a history of their own.

Keeping the history of our own mental framework in mind even as we write history practically forces us to embrace some sense of disciplinary humility.  We do our best work when we keep front and center "a conception of the limits of historical knowledge."[2] Instead of a totalizing grand narrative, or grandiose explanatory claims, historians attentive to the limitations of our own discipline would (ideally) write, Allan Megill suggests, with a "greater humility and reflexiveness with regard to the interpretation of the past" -- a "self-ironic style."[3]  This is the practice of history as a sort of tonic of humility -- an ironic self-awareness that we must not be self-righteous in our own certainties.   

Irony. Humility. Detachment.  This is what history has to offer. 

This is what history has to offer?  Oh, how the mighty have fallen!  But it is, I would argue, a fortunate fall -- though not all historians have made the leap.  Indeed, one of my colleagues on the U.S. Intellectual History blog is concerned that I seem to have lost a sense of the heuristic purpose of doing history:  to draw from the particular circumstances of the past some generally applicable principles for the present.  "Isn't that part of how we learn from history," my colleague asked me in a recent blog comment, "learn to avoid the mistakes of the past? Or," he continued, "are you a postmodernist such that you see these applications as overwrought with hazards? How do you talk truth with those who come to history seeking SOME limited universal truths? How do you sell historical thinking if you disallow present applications?"[4]  It's a fair question.  After all, I had been saying there -- and I am saying here -- that "when history veers into a discussion of what is true in a transhistorical or 'timeless' sense, it ceases to be history."[5]

Indeed, "timeless" and "historical" don't really go together. 

Instead, what history can offer is a careful, attentive, thick if not thorough interpretation of a particular past context.  The point of such interpretation is not to distill some lesson that will help us "avoid the mistakes of the past"; because time is on the move, the mistakes of the past are unrepeatable.  That's one of the implications of contingency:  each present moment is the product of innumerable choices made and chances taken by others.  So history can't repeat itself; we are wonderfully free to make new mistakes now.  How's that for a liberated future? 

That's a very liberated future.  In his famous -- and much assigned -- essay, "The Burden of History," Hayden White describes how foregrounding contingency frees up the future.  History has the "special task" of bringing people to "an awareness that their present condition was always in part a product of specifically human choices, which could therefore be changed or altered by further human action."[6]  As George Cotkin affirms, "we are born into structures of power and culture that constrain us.  But, at the same time," he continues, "we retain a degree of agency that may assimilate or change those structures to varying degrees."[7]  Intellectual history in particular foregrounds the way that such structuring ideas shape not only the world that people are born into but also the very conceptual limits of how they can imagine reacting against that world.  Grasping this dynamic -- getting some sense of the sheer weight of what people have to wade through to ever think differently about anything -- makes it easier to view individual people, past and present, with less judgment and more understanding.

...

So our job as historians is to speak to our time, to speak to our culture, by speaking faithfully about the past.

The historian's task is simple:  to reconstruct a moment, or a series of moments, from the past, and to hold that past up to view not so that we might commend or condemn it, but so that we might understand it.  That exercise -- the demonstration of how to suspend judgment in favor of understanding -- repeated again and again, defines both the process and the product of history faithfully practiced.  Leading others through that exercise with us is the pedagogical, the scholarly, and -- in a certain sense -- the pastoral work of  secular historians.  We must leave to our historical subjects the harsh and uncompromising and proudly immoderate rhetoric of moral absolutism.  Let Garrison thunder like a prophet, and let us hear him in the context of his time.  Ironically, in the context of our time, to demonstrate ironic detachment and some sense of humility about our own habitual [historical?] certainties is, in its own way, profoundly prophetic.

--------------------
[1]Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, Vol. 29 No. 2 (May, 1990), 132.
[2]Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 56.
[3]Megill 186.
[4]Tim Lacy, March 15, 2012 (10:35 a.m.), comment on Tim Lacy, “Tim's Light Reading (3-15-2012): Gretel Adorno, Richard Theodore Greener, Ontics, Defending First Principles, and Tony Judt via Jennifer Homans,” U.S. Intellectual History, March 15, 2012, http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/03/tims-light-reading-3-15-2012-gretel.html.
[5]L.D. Burnett, March 15, 2012 (9:15 a.m.), comment on Lacy, "Light Reading (3-15-2012)."
[6]Hayden White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1966), 133.
[7]George Cotkin, "History's Moral Turn," Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, No. 2 (April 2008), 305.

Disembodied Voices in Intellectual History

In his recent post on Embodiment in Intellectual History, Ben raised the question of how intellectual historians might more effectively or fruitfully consider the "embodied aspects of the people about whom we write." He suggested that a consideration of "intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous." 
I began to wonder:  when was the last time that our communication technologies weren't in some way disembodied.  We probably have to go back to prehistory for that.  But I forbid my students from beginning their essays at the dawn of time, or writing an introductory paragraph about the course of human history, so I will spare you a similar sweeping gesture.  Besides, we do (mostly) U.S. history around here -- our wayback machine doesn't go very far back (though it might be salutary for us if it did). 

So as I thought about Ben's post, and I thought about how intellectual historians might "do embodiment" well, I was reminded of one of my favorite sections of A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin's brilliant biography of William Jennings Bryan.*

Kazin's extended meditation on the sonority of Bryan's voice provides an excellent example of how intellectual historians can explore what someone's physical presence meant for the articulation and reception of his or her ideas.  In the Great Commoner's case, this particular aspect of Bryan's (self-consciously performative) self-performance seems to have imbued his ideas with a liveliness and appeal that they lacked when presented in mere text, as printed words upon a page.

Kazin writes about the almost magical power of Bryan's speaking voice.

How did he do it? One born too late to hear Bryan on the stump or in a convention hall can only gather up reminiscences and marvel that, in an era satiated with oratory, he could lead so many people, foes as well as allies, to describe him as the most compelling speaker they'd ever heard (48).

Listeners commented on the extraordinary timbre of Bryan's voice:

Nearly every recollection begins by describing the quality of that voice. "Sonorous and melodious," "deep and powerfully musical," "soothing but penetrating," "free, bold, picturesque," "clear as a cathedral bell..." (48)

As Kazin points out, such praise sounds very much like the aesthetic judgment audiences might have pronounced upon a stage actor's talents.

Like them, the Nebraskan could project his voice a remarkable distance. Mary Bryan recalled one day in 1898 when, from inside a hotel room in Corpus Christi, she could hear her husband perfectly "three long blocks" away.  At national conventions, before the introduction of amplified sound in the early 1920s, Bryan's was often the only voice that could reach every seat in the house. And his diction -- clear, precise, and rendered with a slight prairie twang that passed for no accent at all -- ensured that listeners could understand every word (48).

I am intrigued by the gendered aspects of Bryan's appeal.  Apparently, he sounded like a man was supposed to sound.  And I can't help but wonder: what were women supposed to sound like when they spoke in public?  "They weren't," would be the easy laugh line here.  But there were women on the Chautauqua circuit, and I suspect that someone like Carrie Nation could hold a crowd's attention.  But I don't know that her appeal was aesthetic -- or acoustical -- in the way that Bryan's seemed to be.  Instead, part of the draw there (in addition to audience interest in the content of her speech) might have been the sheer spectacle of going to see a woman -- and such a woman! -- speak in public.

In terms of going to hear women, I suppose that famous female vocalists and melodramatic actresses could have drawn great crowds wherever they performed. But except for stage performers and professional entertainers, I wonder if there were many women who would have been able to draw a crowd simply to hear the sound of their speaking voices, as crowds wanted to do in Bryan's case.

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, what were the aesthetic expectations for public female -- and/or feminine -- speech?  (I mean besides "Ladies, please don't!")  What acoustical features, what kind of sonority, might have marked a pleasing, public female voice?  If you have some bibliographic suggestions, please add them to the comments below.  This is something I'll need to look at in relation to my work in the early 20th century, and I should probably base my understanding of the matter on something more authoritative than Singin' in the Rain.  ("I caiiiiiint staiiiind him.")

In any case, Bryan's heyday may have been the age of oratory, but it was not yet the age of radio. Kazin writes:

A...GOP partisan named Ira Smith first heard Bryan in 1896. Half a century later, he recalled: "I listened to his speech as if every word and every gesture were a revelation. It is not my nature to be awed by a famous name, but I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth." The next day, Smith read the same speech in a newspaper and "disagreed with almost all of it." He was glad, in retrospect, that "the most remarkable orator of the century" had passed his prime before the onset of radio. Otherwise, Smith, who ran the White House mailroom for five decades, believed the Nebraskan would certainly have been elected president (49).

To me, this is perhaps the most striking insight of all -- one of those "for want of a nail" arguments that sets history swinging on the hinge of a single slim contingency.

Heck, maybe old Ira Smith was right.

Or was he making the kind of appeal to technology's magic -- or to charisma's power? -- that often serves as a sop to our most simplistic explanatory urges?  For example, we've probably all heard some version of "Kennedy beat Nixon because of television."  That's a little too easy.  And I think it would be really bad history to say, "If Bryan had been broadcast coast to coast on the radio, he surely would have won the White House."  But Kazin, who doesn't tend to write bad history, doesn't say that.

Furthermore, as Kazin points out, it was not merely his voice alone that made Bryan so appealing; it was his deep sincerity. "Listeners enjoyed being in his presence and often felt inspired by a guileless orator who seemed an authentic representative of the producing classes. A politics of character thus blended into a politics of celebrity as Bryan's voice became known throughout the land" (49). That part about "being in his presence" suggests a whole performative rhetoric of look and gesture, physicality, sturdy manliness, that went along with that big sonorous voice.  So radio might not have helped Bryan much anyhow.

In their introduction to an audio clip of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, recorded in a studio twenty-five years after it was first delivered, the editors at GMU's History Matters site note that the recording "does not capture the power and drama of the original address."  Perhaps only listeners who had heard Bryan speaking live and also heard that recording could judge whether or not the recording "gets" Bryan.  Listening to his disembodied voice today, we have the challenge of wading through almost one hundred years of technologically mediated cultural history -- or culturally mediated technological history -- that have worked to shape what we think a (man's) voice ought to sound like.

But if audio recordings didn't seem to do justice to Bryan's oratorical gifts, that may have had less to do with the disembodiment of Bryan's voice than with the disembodiment of Bryan's audience.  Maybe it wasn't enough for Bryan to stretch himself out upon a Cross of Gold in a recording studio; maybe he needed a stadium full of people to bring power to his performance.

Along with Ben, I too would be interested to hear (!) our readers' thoughts on the more general question of how attention to embodiment can work in intellectual history.  I would suggest that exploring the (dis)connection between voice and presence, ideas and embodiment, matters not only in history, but for history -- for how we study it, for how we write it, and for how we perform it (and ourselves) here in the silent cacophony of the intellectual history blogosphere.

What say you?

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*If my discussion of this book seems vaguely familiar to you, it might be because I swiped a few paragraphs for this post from my old blog.  But I had, like, Seven Faithful Readers.  So I'm guessing it's new to you.