Social history for beginners: a "young scholar" looks at his new profession.

I officially entered the historical profession in September, 1995, the month I began graduate school. Seven years of schooling would follow, ending at last with the presentation of a degree that looked all too small in its case and the chance to wear a funny hat and medieval robes on a day other than Halloween. But at the beginning, I had no distinct direction: all I really knew was that I wanted to be a historian. How I ended up as something like a social historian was through a murky combination opportunism and luck.

Although I was not young (I had had a career before going back to graduate school in my mid-thirties), I was almost entirely unaware of the tides and eddies of the great ocean of historical research and writing that now lay before me. For the first time I was fully exposed to the breadth of the styles, fads, and trends in history. I came to understand that social history had once been a fringe movement, composed of radical, mostly left-wing historians with an ideology that demanded that history be rewritten to include the stories of traditionally ignored peoples and classes. They argued that history had been fossilized, that it was simply a concoction of the sugar-coated exploits of Dead White Males. The history that lay beneath this surface--the stories of the poor, shunned, marginal, and neglected--would not merely broaden and enrich history, but it would present Truth to the world.

The success of their struggle is now obvious. The banner of multiculturalism now flies high over the towers of the academy, is deeply embedded in school textbooks, and even occasionally appears on that last bastion of Dead White Male history, the historical television documentary. Two entire generations of historians have been trained to regard the imperatives of social history as history itself. The generation hired or trained in the nineteen-sixties was, by the time I entered graduate school, now the ruling class: their agenda was the dominant historical paradigm, at least within the academy.

But outside the academy, they remained a fringe movement. Most of the historical reading 1 had done before going back to university had mainly been from the realm of popular nonfiction, the kind of stuff that shows up on the New York Times best-seller list. That history, published by trade book publishers, rarely reflected the driving themes of social historians.

The fact that I had not been exposed to this kind of history before I entered graduate school came from an unfortunate truth of my education: I had not previously been well trained in the historical profession. As a result it was something of a shock when I entered it and discovered that most of the kind of history I had been reading was considered within the profession to be marginal, at best. I quickly learned that if I were to prosper in history I would need to radically shift gears, to become much more interested in topics on the agenda of social historians.

I was not the only one of my graduate school contemporaries to be unsettled by this discovery. In the light of this some of my new colleagues chose not to continue as professional historians and left at the end of their master's degree. These aspiring graduate students, many of whose interests still lay with the now-marginal fields of diplomatic, political, or even military history, felt shut out by the dominant paradigm. Others in this group soldiered on, hoping they could find their niche. But most of us who went on for a Ph.D. and who had not already been cast in that mold modified our interests to be able to enhance our marketability: we moved with the current historical fashion to shape ourselves as social historians. Consequently, even if many of us did not choose topics directly in the social history mold, we worked hard to incorporate race, or ethnicity, or gender, or class, into our arguments, enough, we hoped, to make us palatable to that eventual job search committee.

Of course, we were being influenced by the other major trends happening in history circa 1995. Probably the most visible was the the postcultural/poststructural/postmodern revolution, which then was in full throat. The often opaque writings of Foucault were mandatory reading in several historiography classes, and ambitious students worked their way through, for example, the essays of Jacques Derrida. Questions of what, if anything, was a fact were being debated, at times shrilly. The pervasiveness of this movement was evidenced in conference announcements of the period that called for a plethora of (re)thinkings, (re)writings, and various other de-constructings. Many of my bewildered colleagues, those for whom this language had little, or no meaning, were filled with a woozy sensation that coherent writing, speech, even thinking, were near collapse. As we struggled with these concepts and acquired an entirely new, often obscure, vocabulary, we tried to find a solid heart to these movements. And in many cases we did find just enough to make some of these notions valuable. But history, in general, has proved fairly impervious to the postmodern movements. And although they seemed permanent in 1995, we could not realize that they were beginning a steep decline. They, too, would pass. And pass they have; each year has made these "post-" movements look increasingly antiquated.

But beyond postmodernism, what else did we have to choose from in 1995? We could have taken on the old high fashion for Marxism and molded our historical research and conclusions around that set of dogmas. But by 1995 Marxism had, for many of us, become increasingly unconvincing. Communism, although never a true expression of socialism, was in retreat across the world. In Eastern Europe it had entirely collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union. But even China, a seemingly permanent and unshakable bastion of communism, was embracing capitalism. And although we knew that Soviet Communism had never been a true expression of Marxism, it had been, nonetheless, the most vocal claimant to Marx's mantle. Beyond these geopolitical factors, by 1995 Marxism felt outdated, at best, although it did offer some useful tools for describing the shifts within countries and economies and an occasionally useful model of class warfare. But Marx was less convincing for many of us when it came to explain, for example, the role of slavery in the antebellum United States. Finally, within the field of history the majority of the most prominent Marx-influenced advocates were beginning to step from the stage; by 1995, many had either just retired or were about to.

We could have chosen Marxism's ideological opposite. In 1995, a loud, shrill cry came from the right. The most visible expression of this movement had arrived during the 1994 mid-term elections, which had delivered a strident and obnoxious political group into the U.S. Congress, the Gingrich Republicans. Newt Gingrich, their pudgy leader, had been trained as a historian, and through his rhetoric, often laced with the language of history, there was now a strong agenda to change the teaching and practice of history in Washington. Although this agenda had almost no influence within the historical profession in academe, it was nonetheless consuming a fair amount of energy and time, as historians sought to refute or deflect its major premises. It argued, for example, that the way history was being taught then had weakened America. The conservative enthusiasts claimed that there had been a shocking decline of American morals, morale, pride, patriotism, and a corresponding growth of distrust, suspicion, and outright disloyalty. All of this, they argued, had made the United States a country incapable of leading the world with (as they saw it) its unique, God-given mission. Gingrich often spoke on these themes, and he often placed a specific date on the beginning of America's decline: 1955. There are few more revealing dates a conservative white Southerner could have chosen.

What Gingrich and his followers were targeting was the dominance of social history. A large number of the reasons they chose for the decline of America came from the prominence of the new history of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Social history's emphasis on multiculturalism, they argued, had caused this decline in American confidence, as it tended to reveal those moments where the idea of America had fallen so far short. At its best, they argued, social history was disloyal. At its worst, it was treason.

Their prescription for change called for a return to the celebratory and glorifying history most popular in the nineteenth century. These stories of American greatness had not been written for at least forty years or more. These tales once revived, it was made clear, would emphasize America's successes and minimize the conflicts that social history had made its raison d'etre. Despite the movement's scant success within academia, its continuing influence has affected our profession: anyone who has to write, for example, a history text for the state of Texas has had to deal with it. And several of the historical controversies of the late 1990s--the Smithsonian exhibit about Hiroshima, the History Standards debate, for example--were shaped by this political agenda. (1)

For me and my contemporaries, the Gingrich revolution's fight against the new academic history was the last great battle stemming from the 1960s. As a rearguard action, it was the fight by those who had been losers in the discipline's internal war against its winners. This war had been fought at conferences and in journals and on hiring committees. What the right was crying hardest against was the incontrovertible fact that social history had become mainstream history. Conference agendas, journal articles, textbooks, children's books, even televised presentations all reflected the shift. By 1995, the concerns of social history had become the keystone of the profession, its dominant paradigm. There was little history in the professional canon that could get published that did not at least acknowledge these concerns. What it meant for us was that we had to work to conform our interests to the mainstream of history if we wanted to get hired.

The challenge we faced as regards our direction was compounded by the mechanics of graduate school. What topics could we choose that would, many years hence, get us that job? Did our dissertations have to be tiny snippets, micro historical studies, limited, nearly insignificant? Did we have to look at the poorest, or could we look at other social classes? And what if we were interested in the Dead White Males: if we were, say, diplomatic, political, or even military historians by inclination?

But, perhaps more important, what about me? Where did I want to land?

I had had an eclectic route into history. I had always wanted to be a historian, at least from age twelve, but I had always dismissed the goal out of hand: it could never be profitable, and, after all, what did one do with a degree in history? As a consequence, I had a career that took me through a bachelor's degree in computer science and then a master's degree in geography, initially cartography but finally historical geography. In the end, 1 wrote a thesis, military history at its core but with enough of a geographical twist to still qualify as geography. Based on primary sources, it was just historical enough that 1 was accepted into history programs at the master's level at two universities, each of which offered a distinct choice.

One was Temple University, where I would have worked with a distinguished military historian. A charming and pleasant man, open and warm, he had been kind enough to read my thesis and like it. Had I gone to Temple, I might well have become a military historian. The other university was the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. My choice came down to two major factors, one involving my career, the other the place to live. Downtown Philadelphia or Amherst, Massachusetts? Military history or some form of other history?

I began to focus more on the long term, and in the final analysis, military history looked like a career dead end. The resultant job choices were limited and were concentrated mostly in the South or in other places I did not want to live. Perhaps if this had been, say, 1940, or even 1960, I would have chosen to become a military historian. But in a historical profession deeply shaped by the conflicts of the 1960s, and most especially transformed by the triumph of social historians, military history was as much on the margins of the historical profession as was possible in 1995. UMass-Amherst, on the other hand, had several well respected social and cultural historians. And it was in Amherst, a lovely little town. Finally, though, if I went there, I might even be able to get a job when I left. And so it was Amherst, a decision I have rarely regretted.

In our early days, my entering classmates were often befuddled by the kind of readings we were given. Most of us had not been all that well trained, and we had been programmed by our traditional historical experience to consider the kind of history we were studying to be marginal. Although most of us had been taught in history in the 1980s or even the 1990s, for us, still, the lives of slaves, or workers, or poor working-class people were evidently less important than the high decision-makers we had learned about. Few of us were well versed in what had become the mainstream of the profession, and it took many of us several months to begin to appreciate that this history, too, offered valuable, even essential interpretations of history. For some of us, this was a hard sell, and many colleagues either sought out other institutions, dropped out, or changed their ideas dramatically, albeit with some struggle.

My interests were quite fluid in the first year or so of graduate school, and I could have fallen into a number of different sub-fields. I was aware, though, that I had to shape my ultimate dissertation topic. Again, the demands of the discipline were paramount: I knew that, in addition to finding a topic I could live with for the four or so years it would take to finish, I had to have one that could be welcomed within the profession, and, ultimately, published.

What I did become was only a little bit of a social historian. Perhaps foolishly, I found myself writing about topics that did not fully explore the intricacies of race, gender, or ethnicity. My dissertation--"The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1835"--was, unfortunately, mostly about rich people. As such, though, it was about class, and in a way, I twisted the traditional expectations of social history back on themselves. I wanted to focus on a traditionally ignored group--and in this case, the concerns of the wealthy, which have been heartily, joyfully ignored by most academics over the last generation--and take a new look at them. I came at this with the notion that there was, in the United States of the 1820s, a strong effort to play to this audience, to create materials to appeal to them. They were, after all, the book-buying public, and nearly all of the authors, painters, and writers of the day sought to join this coveted class.

This whole paradigm, of course, smacks of heresy. Rich people? Their concerns? How could this possibly be social history? I argue, in response, that for many of the class strivers of the time, selective emulation of the wealthiest classes was a hallmark of their best efforts. The search for gentility, as described by some cultural historians (John Kasson, Karen Halttunen, Richard Bushman, for example), most often involved emulating elements of the style of the wealthiest, albeit shaped by middle-class concerns. And, I argue, perhaps more dangerously, that this pattern transmitted even more widely, to the least wealthy, something that seems to be a particular trait of American society. My next project will be something along the same lines: I want to look at how the increasingly multicultural, multiracial society of antebellum New York City shaped the development of the high and middle-class culture being produced there. Apparently--and this was not necessarily something of deep calculation--I have found a traditionally ignored population, if "tradition" can be defined as "in the last twenty years."

But the ultimate the test of whether I have chosen well will come in two places: at the publisher's, and on the job market. The number of job possibilities in the Fall of 2000 was heartening, but the number in the Fall of 2001 was positively thrilling. No less than twelve jobs were open in the New England region for a nineteenth-century U.S. social/cultural historian by early September, and although I was still ABD, I applied for them all. (The blurred distinction between social and cultural historian, by the way, is quite common.) I got none: the market may have been remarkable, but an ABD nonetheless is less than fully qualified.

From the perspective of August, 2001, this year's market looked like it, too, would have been fertile. After all, universities and colleges were flush with their new market gains. The Baby Boomers' children were entering higher education in record numbers. The historians hired during the last boom, from 1963 to 1968, were retiring in droves. All was clear skies, fair weather ahead.

But then the tragedy befell us that September. For once, most of the cliches held and although not Everything changed, many things did. Many of the jobs of the Fall of 2001, although posted, were never given final approval. Colleges and universities began drawing their wagons tightly together. In my target region, the Northeast, the states faced enormous budget shortfalls and projected cuts unseen since the 1970s. Most of them planned to pass these along to their colleges and universities. All seemed bleak last December, as the market for temporary jobs also disappeared. But the retirement of the 1960s generation has given the market a bit of life, even though only three professors are being replaced for every five positions lost, in some cases, or even one for every two retirements. This Fall, the number of job openings has been better than expected.

As for book publishing, social history remains a strong draw among the academic presses. Even a casual glance at the books being reviewed or the articles being published in the major journals demonstrates the strength and pervasiveness of social history. Whether this will change in the coming years remains to be seen: the inherent time lag from research to writing to revision to publication means that the aftereffects of the great changes of 2001 will only be truly felt by 2004 or 2005.

But what of the future? Will there be a return to traditional history as the generation hired in the 1960s retires? At the moment, this seems unlikely. The historians hired in the last twenty years have remained well within the mold of social history, their concerns fully set into the agenda of race-class-ethnicity-gender. It would take another revolution like the uprisings of the 1960s to effect the kind of sweeping change that the triumph of social history represents. Could that happen? Might we see another generation so sick, so tired of the excesses of their mentors that they demand radical change? As a historian, I will not dare forecast: our profession has had such a terrible track record on predicting the future that any prognostication I would make would only be fodder for some chuckling future reader, looking back on the foolishness of his ancestors.

However, it is possible that a historian fifty years on will look back at us with amusement at our little concerns. She may find our obsession with the lives of the poor quaint, our concerns about the struggles among the classes warranting at most faint interest. For a new paradigm to be forged, it has to counter the standing one. The profession of history moves slowly, but perhaps the generation that is now being raised in a new atmosphere--that inchoate, uncertain, Post-9/11 Generation--will choose to return to the Old Truths. Or, perhaps, they will find us insufficiently radical, timid, foolish in our concerns. My generation of historians may be one of those that sit on the cusp, neither one thing nor the other. Heavily shaped by the generation of the 1960s, most of us may become mere simulacrums of our mentors. Or, perhaps, we will tire of this role pressed on us and shake off the standing paradigms. Whatever the future will bring to the discipline of history, though, will undoubtedly be something that none of us expect. Perhaps few of us will like it. What we can expect is that the truths of our time--and, indeed, the current pre-eminence of social history--will be eventually overthrown. As someone who has worked to fit into that mold, I, for one, hope it is in a day long after my retirement.

Department of History

Amherst, MA 01003-3930

ENDNOTE 

(1.) This campaign, although now much muted, is still being carried on in some quarters. I found this recently while researching the McGuffey Readers. Although long out of print, they are now being reprinted and marketed as, in the words of one Web site, "good Christian readers" (http://www.booklineandthinker.com/page08.html). One site encapsulates these arguments: "The McGuffey Readers were a better reading system than anything that exists in a school today ... [but] weren't politically correct ... History hasn't changed since it happened. So why do we need new history books?" (http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Spa/2106/politi02.htm)

By Richard Gassan

University of Massachusetts