Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story: on Historiography

Just to clear some things up, this is not a piece about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton. It just happened to be a fitting line to discuss how historiography works, and, loosely, what it is. But we don’t settle for “loose” around here, and defining what historiography is leaves its effects unexamined — and if there’s one thing we don’t do, it’s leave effects unexamined.

Clio, the muse of history whose name means, rather, “glory,” as painted by Artemisia Gentileschi.

So let’s talk about historiography, then. Broadly, historiography deals not with what is related in an historical record, but who relates it, and how, and perhaps most importantly, to what end. As mentioned, the Hamilton line quoted in the title aptly sums up the problem posed by histories of all kinds. To bring in historiography and its methods, then, is to examine the glass of history’s window (an analogy I’m borrowing from Terry Eagleton’s comparison of poetry and prose in this book) — when we look at historical narratives, I feel, we too often leave the concerns of historiography aside in the interests of the story.

This is, of course, one of the criticisms leveled at Hamilton: that is uncritically supports and embroiders historical fact in the interest of storytelling. I know I took a dim view of it from the first blush of its popularity, but that’s mostly because as it entered the popular consciousness (for me, this happened via Tumblr some years prior to the musical’s release on film), I happened to be reading a book about the Whiskey Rebellion. No spoilers when I say that Hamilton is not exactly the hero of that story — but Miranda was not, and has never claimed to be, in the business of writing history. What Hamilton does is historical mythology, which is, once again, a different concern than relating historical facts.

But enough about Hamilton, a musical I’ve never seen. Let’s talk about the real topic: who writes the histories, and how, and why.

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The study of history is, in many ways, an exercise in credulity. After a certain point, the student just has to sort of trust that not everyone can be lying about everything — or perhaps before a certain point. Because I think most people, in reading history, eventually arrive at the realization that history is, in the present, written: someone worried over the sentence structure and the prevailing cultural values just as much as they did about what so-and-so said to someone else about some bullshit, and those worries carry, on a good day, equal weight to the writer of history. And after that, the concern either fades back into the credulity of ostensibly-indisputable facts — so many guns at the Battle of Waterloo, so many men in the Battle of the Somme — or it doesn’t, and history is forever looking over her shoulder at fiction, denying the relation like the embarrassed, preppy child of hippies.

By “later Roman history,” we’re talking about the part that produced this kind of thing. Image from Wikipedia.

For me, that moment arrived, or at least, I hit the point of no return on the realization, in a class on the later Roman empire that I had the pleasure of taking with Hagith Sivan. Professor Sivan’s style included an emphasis on knowing your dates and emperors, but also taking a little time at the beginning of our discussions of primary sources in translation to think about who wrote the piece we were about to read, and what we could surmise about their probable views. The attrition rate in that class was staggering: we started with, I think, more than twenty students, and by finals week we were down to about ten; I was shocked, in talking to an acquaintance who had dropped the class, to learn that he did so because of those discussions of who wrote what we were about to read.

But that dude was into military history — so many ships at the Battle of Actium, so many Spartans at the Hot Gates — and I am only a dabbler there. The systematic examination of who precisely wrote what we were reading, and what biases they brought to the tale, was thrilling to me (and the fact that Professor Sivan is terrifying probably didn’t hurt). Who wrote this? Where did they hear about it? What do they gain in telling us about it, and why did they relate it in this way?

These questions, for all they may seem piddling, have so long gone unasked in our cultural conversations. What better time than now, then, to begin asking them?

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An object-lesson in the importance of historiography is provided this Vox interview with historian Khalil Muhammad on the history of U.S. policing. In discussing the the violent, racist history of U.S. police, Muhammad says:

Social science played a huge role. What we’d call today “academic experts,” of one kind or another, were part of the effort to define black people as a particular criminal class in the American population. And what they essentially did was they used the evidence coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery. They used the census data to point to the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. They were almost three times overrepresented in the 1890 census in Southern prisons.

In the interests of racism, the methods by which Black people were criminalized in the post-Civil War south were ignored and erased. Instead of questioning the sources of these statistics, the “experts” to whom Muhammad alludes chose to uncritically accept numbers produced by a fundamentally unreliable source — and this brings us to the present moment.

Numbers? We think? Who knows how those things work. Image from here.

It would be remiss to say it is purely a matter of historiography to which Muhammad refers; statistical manipulation is a huge problem in public discourse, and has been since there were statistics to manipulate. But the history of the United States of America, as we read it and relate it, skews ever closer to mythologizing: for many people, we learn what we learn in school, from textbooks written to be forgotten, by authors whose names we don’t remember, with sources cited if we’re lucky — and who’s checking the sources in their textbooks at age ten? Who’s looking up the authors? Who’s following the money?

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The money is a big part of the U.S.’s historiographical failings and the rise of historical myth — the money, and the interests. At this point, I assume it’s common knowledge that Texan fuckery impacts the content of U.S. history textbooks, but in case it’s not, here’s a piece from Vox (I swear, I read other stuff; it’s just that they’re not paywalled like some people, who go into greater detail) which, eventually, gets into the broad strokes of the situation. Basically: Texas buys their textbooks first, gets editorial privileges for its fuckbag school board, and fucks up every school system buying textbooks after them. The fact that it was actual news when Texas finally began to emphasize slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War (in 20-fucking-18) is pretty damning, and the reliance on what is, essentially, consensus history written by people who don’t know or care about history is really… not even surprising, at this point. We’ve been under the thumb of consensus history — and what a bullshit fucking term; I realize that I generally align with its coiner in disliking the practice, but you know when you encounter a word or phrase that really just sums up a bunch of things that have been setting your teeth on edge forever? That — for like 70 years now.

A statue in Washington, PA, commemorating the Whiskey Rebellion, the irony of which is palpable. Image from here.

This reliance on fictive histories brings us to a term I’ve used a few times now: historical mythology, or historical mythologizing. Functionally, this is what the Texas school board has engaged in; it’s why we don’t really teach the Whiskey Rebellion because that’s the one where George Washington lead troops against American citizens, many of whom were veterans of the Revolutionary war — itself, arguably, a massive, violent tax dodge: these are only two examples out of thousands in the U.S. alone. We erase those events in favor of a myth of manifest destiny and eternal progress, discussing the social liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century as if COINTELPRO weren’t a very real thing.

Some of this, of course, can be placed at the feet of neoliberalism, at least as a proximal cause — but we’ve been writing histories a lot longer than neoliberalism, and the same type of mythologizing happens in every place and every time that history has been written. Not every historical document or record is afflicted by blind mythologizing, but all of them could be.

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So what do we do? George Santayana wasn’t wrong on the whole those-who-cannot-remember-the-past thing; we’ve got to learn history, and frankly, if it feels like I was angling towards an argument against reading history, I’ve woefully fucked up. What I’m arguing for is an examination of our sources, and critical thinking in our approach to them.

Some of the skills outlined in Cameron’s piece on informational hygiene apply here, as do elements of basic statistics — if nothing else, understanding proportion and how percentages work is extremely useful. But another key tool in the fight against historical mythologizing is actually historical imagination of the kind I mentioned in connection to that later Roman history class. As we piece together a broader understanding of an historical period, we gain the ability to exercise this imagination: if you know a little about monks and early Christianity, you can guess a little about what an early Christian monk might have to say about, for example, a holy man, and why he might be saying the things that he says.

Ah, AZQuotes, repository of fatuous memes.

No history is free of bias. No history is free of error, embellishment, or lacunae. The experienced moment vanishes — but reading history was never merely a passive enterprise, and to pretend otherwise does a disservice to the present. When we read history, when we engage with it, it is more than worth our while to take the time to learn a little about the author of the history, their contexts and their beliefs, in addition to those examined in the historical text itself. We are, after all, living through history all the time (and eventually, you too can be part of the historical record). The past may be a foreign country — but the guidebook was written here.

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If you’re an educator, please consider this list of resources from the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, as well as this resource from the NEA, as well as Get Diverse Lit on Instagram. All are, in different ways, material to the topic of this piece. If for some reason you want to hear more from me but in a fictional mode, please check out my novella, available here. We are also accepting fiction submissions, for which we do pay.

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