Which History to Make?

There are a couple of ways of doing history that have attracted my attention quite a bit over the years, which I still find powerfully gripping. The first is finding things that I think are important, that have been ignored by historians. I like the idea of finding these forgotten or repressed elements of the past and bringing them to light. It's a bit thrilling, to be able to tell a reader of listener, "Here's something you ought to know about the past, but that you never saw in a book or heard about in school." The second attractive idea is related. It's about setting the record straight or debunking inadvertent errors or deliberate misinformation that have found their way into the mainstream understanding of the past.

I'll admit these interests are a bit perverse. Isn't is a bit weird, you may be thinking, to focus so obsessively on what our traditions omit or misrepresent? Doesn't it open me to a danger of being fooled by conspiracy theories and fringe speculations?

I have a couple of answers to offer. First, it has only been relatively recently (in about the last half-century in the US, for example) that the new discipline of Social History began asking questions about the life experiences and worldviews of people who were not the "Great Men" of political and military status or holders of great wealth or elite thinkers. These people clearly had outsized influence on events, but what about everybody else? I don't think it's at all surprising that one of America's first generation of Social Historians, Howard Zinn, wrote one of the most controversial popular history books, A People's History of the United States. At this point it's probably important to say that not all the critics of mainstream history are leftists. Larry Schweikart, for example, is a conservative author of about 25 books focused on retelling American History along what he considers more patriotic and religious lines.

This brings me to the second question about conspiracy theories and the fringe ideas. Although I think we need to be careful when we evaluate challenges from either the right or the left, it's also important to realize that question includes an implicit assumption that the history at the "center" is free of unfounded claims or biased interpretations. The fact that a majority of people believe something or consider it mainstream doesn't guarantee its accuracy. Enough examples of this spring to mind in just the past few years, that I won't waste time relitigating that point here.

I'm thinking about these obsessions of mine today because I've been strategizing about the future of this Substack. I'm trying to focus my energy on things I like writing about, that readers and listeners also like. Often, that seems to fall into the category of "Here's something interesting you may not know about the past." It's a bonus when that little-known detail about the past can tell us something about the present.

Often, for me, surprises about the past emerge from primary sources that show the perspectives of people who may not have shared the views of the folks through whose eyes we normally see the major events. We have a fairly good idea by now, I think, of what the founding fathers thought about the American Revolution. But what did Loyalists think? Or enslaved Africans? Or people in the rest of British North America or the Caribbean that didn't join the thirteen rebellious colonies? I have posted hundreds of primary sources over the past couple of years, but typically just as transcripts with audio narrations. Maybe I should revisit some of them and discuss what jumps out at me from the sources; both to model the process and to sort-of jump-start readers' own thought processes.

I'm also considering looking some more at past events as context for the present. For example, we've heard a lot in the past few years about "rigged elections". A lot of the commentary has described this (often as an "existential threat") as a brand new phenomenon. Would it be valuable to people evaluating these alarmist claims, to know a little more about the election of 1824, where Andrew Jackson won the popular vote but the House of Representatives made John Quincy Adams President? Or the election of 1876, where Samuel Tilden won but Rutherford B. Hayes became president? Or even 2000 (how short are our memories!) when Al Gore probably won but the Supreme Court halted the recount?

For that matter, I've always wanted to read a decision-by-decision history of the Supreme Court, which I don't think would lead people to revere it quite as much as they currently do. One that connected cases with the people who ruled on them. For example, the Dred Scott decision is much easier to understand when you know something about Roger Taney. I've been hoping someone beside me would write this, but no one seems to be picking up the ball.