Who Owns History?
February 10th, 2004by Eric Foner
ISBN: 0809097052
I suprised myself by picking this up. In no way do I consider myself a history buff. I recoil at the memory of U.S. History classes in high school, do not understand the Civil War reenactment thing, or the romance surrounding the American Revolution. (I will, however, admit to a fondness for the History Channel, perhaps because I enjoy comforting voiceover naration as I fall asleep on the couch.)
And I loved this book.
It is a collection of nine essays, written over the last twenty years, which all involve interrogations of the present in light of the past. From the preface:
History always has been and always will be regularly rewritten, in response to new questions, new information, new methodologies, and new political, social, and cultural imperatives. But that each generation can and must rewrite history does not mean that history is simply a series of myths and inventions. There are commonly accepted professional standards that enable us to distinguish good history from falsehoods like the denial of the Holocaust. Historical truth does exist, not in the scientific sense but as a reasonable approximation of the past. But the most difficult truth for those outside the ranks of professional historians to accept is that there often exists more than one legitimate way of recounting past events.
In the first essay, Foner recounts how he came to be a historian and outlines his professional development. I found this interesting, as I always wonder how, exactly, people got to be where they are. Grouped with the second essay on the education of one of his intellectual mentors, it provides perspective on why and how historians do what they do.
From this base, Foner ranges from South Africa after collapse of apartheid to Russia in the era of glasnost and perestroika. He considers definitions of American citizenship, socialism in the United States, weighs in on Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on the Civil War, and looks at the fate of African Americans before the Supreme Court.
Foner must be something to see in the classroom, because he has passion for his subjects and the ability to clearly and engagingly explain things. He posits that all history is interpretation, and that folks arguing for teaching “just the facts” always miss this point. Without directly posing the question “why study this stuff?” he nonethelss answers it: History is important because it isn’t just the past, history is alive and in use in the present.
Reading this book helped me to consider history as a process, not simply a chronology of events. Foner provides frameworks for considering how bias works in history, mostly in the interpretation of past events, though he also references the impact of bias as lived experience. He is clear about one of his primary responsibilities as a historian — pointing out the uses and abuses of history in political discourse.
Highly recommended.
