From the Pages of Historically Speaking: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr. on Being a Historian

"On Being a Historian: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr."
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa
Historically Speaking (September 2012)

Historian James Banner's new book Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is an insightful and often provocative overview of the current state of the discipline of history. Drawing on more than fifty years experience both within and outside academic walls, Banner argues that while there is much to celebrate, the discipline needs to acknowledge and confront a number of serious challenges. Banner, the author of many books and essays on history, education, and public affairs, is currently working on a book about revisionist history. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Banner in July 2012.

Donald A. Yerxa: For the benefit of our readers, would you briefly summarize your central argument in Being a Historian?

James M. Banner, Jr.: The basic one, from which the book descends, is that history is a discipline—a distinct domain of knowledge— pursued in many professions. That is, there's no "history profession," as we colloquially call it, as such. That argument's corollary is that academic history, while still the center of gravity of the discipline, does not embody all of historians' knowledge, institutions, or practices. Of course, we know this, but our terminology and the way we relate the history of the discipline haven't caught up with the facts—much to the cost of reputation, reward, self-respect, and, most importantly, the training of historians. I thus also argue that, while the preparation of historians has substantially improved in recent decades, it remains deficient. That argument, that we have farther to go in preparing historians, is like an organ point in a passage of music, the rumbling contention of the entire book. Finally, I argue that historians (like, I must say, sociologists and biologists, attorneys and engineers) must seek more guidance, not from the idols of the tribe—academic professors—or from within the conventional template of graduate student preparation—how principally to become an academic scholar-teacher—but from within themselves, from their particular dispositions, gratifications, aims, and gifts.
Yerxa: What prompted you to write it? And for whom is it written?

Banner: Part of the spur was purely personal as is—isn't it?—all writing. I wanted to try to draw together my reflections, frustrations, and concerns about the entire discipline of history formed over more than a half-century of being a historian. I wanted also to challenge my colleagues to go further in altering the way historians prepare young historians for their professional worlds. And there was a part of me that wished to do what I wish the senior historical organization in the U.S. and the largest and most influential body of historians in the world—the American Historical Association—would periodically do: assess the state of the discipline. And so the book is a kind of evaluation of the condition of the discipline today. But it's also a book with two very specific audiences in mind: first of all aspiring historians, for whom I want to provide a kind of honest, optimistic, yet disenthralled introduction to the discipline they're entering; and second, my more experienced colleagues who ought to be training historians to interact with the larger world as well as with scholars and students and who, I hope, are learning to reach out to that world themselves.

Yerxa: You argue with conviction that it is a mistake to confuse the discipline of history with the profession of history. Why is it such an important distinction to make?

Banner: Simply put, because of the facts. The academic profession is but one of the professions—although, surely, the central one still—in which historians practice their many crafts and apply their great variety of knowledge. Historians also practice history in law and medical schools, in government at all levels, as reporters, in museums and historical societies, and as schoolteachers. These historians, when employed as historians, are all professional historians acting professionally, taking part in the worldwide community of historical discourse and applying historical knowledge in some manner to some purpose. It’s the discipline that binds us, not our places of work, the kinds of work we pursue, the forms our work takes, or the audiences to which we direct that work. Those differ widely. The conventional terminology—“the” history profession—gives pride of place to those who coined the term and have long employed it: academic historians around whom, in the first century of the discipline’s emergence, the world of history gathered. After all, they were the people (mostly men) who created the departments, the standards, the training protocols, the products (mostly books), and the tenure system in which, until the 1960s, most historians were organized. But while historians must still be prepared by academic historians in research universities to master bodies of knowledge and to undertake and produce research scholarship, their employment has long escaped academic walls. In fact, there’s reason to believe that at least half of those now receiving history doctoral degrees, either by choice or necessity (we lack information about that critical matter), do not enter academic work. Consequently, in recent decades we’ve gotten used to distinguishing academic from public historians. That’s fine as far as it goes. But, as I also argue in the book, it’s a weak distinction. Increasingly, historians are hybrids—I’m one of them—who move back and forth between the classroom and other occupations, who write, film, and curate history while holding faculty positions and who teach while working in government or nonacademic institutions. An increasing number of historians are both academic and public historians. So why can’t we just term ourselves historians— colleagues all—and put aside the distinction, perhaps useful but increasingly outmoded, between public and academic historians?  read on >>>

Rewriting History? The Case of Joe Paterno

Alan Bliss

As part of its sanctions against Penn State University, the NCAA last week "vacated" 111 of the Nittany Lions' football victories under their late coach, Joe Paterno. The order changes the official record of Penn State's teams from 1998 to 2011. Technically, then, Coach Paterno no longer holds the NCAA record as the winningest coach in Division I college football.

A non-academic friend, a lawyer by profession, complains that the NCAA is rewriting history. Professional historians like me, my friend argues, should be outraged. Surprisingly, my friend is hardly alone in reading this news as an intolerable assault on historical truth. In the July 24 New York Times, Northwestern University sociologist Gary Alan Fine published an op-ed ("George Orwell and the N.C.A.A.") objecting to the NCAA's records sanction against Penn State:

Professor Fine sees this as a disturbing attempt to re-write the past, or to create a false, "fantasized," history. "George Orwell would be amused," Fine believes. But neither Fine nor others who make this argument seem to be historians, who, as far as I know, are unconcerned by the NCAA's periodic fiddling with its own record books. One reason is that retroactive bookkeeping does little to alter any "history" other than the records of the institution doing the counting. And mind, we are talking here about Division I collegiate football, where even indisputable facts are disputed endlessly. Even if that weren't so, sports historians take pains to explicate the circumstances of athletic records. Future researchers looking up the Lions' football stats will be obliged to learn all about the University's miserable scandal. The NCAA's purpose in sanctioning Penn State will be lastingly served.

As I teach my students, the past is what happened, while history is how we explain and interpret the past. Denying or obscuring inconvenient facts throws historians off at times, and can indeed rise to the level of the Orwellian. But in the long run the practice often fails. For example, we now know that Woods Hole Oceanographer Bob Ballard was not really engaged in a pure-science project to locate the wreck of the RMS Titanic. His 1985 expedition was financed by the U.S. Defense Dept., which sought his technology to examine the deep-sea wrecks of its two lost Cold-war era nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. After obliging the Navy, Dr. Ballard carried out his "cover" mission of locating the Titanic. The success of that side-trip made Ballard an inspirational hero on the order of a winning college football coach. Among his many admirers, the new facts haven't seriously knocked him off his pedestal - they just complicate his story and that of the Titanic's rediscovery.

Historians understand better than most how little we sometimes know. We are alert to the risks that go with formulating historical understanding from data. Numbers can lie, whether they involve college football or voting. I teach students to be skeptical, critical, and open to new ideas, new sources, new data, and new interpretations of the evidence of the past. Some ideologues disdain that as "historical revisionism." But history is endlessly under revision, and we shouldn't want it any other way.

Joe Paterno was a hero. He will always hold a place in history, though the context is different now. The truth about his and Penn State's football program has badly dented his legacy. The NCAA's action on his win-loss record can't hurt the late Coach, whose troubles are over. No doubt, his family and partisans will grieve about this poisonous affair for the rest of their lives. Mainly, Penn State's vacated wins are a message to other coaches, players, administrators, fans, boosters, and just regular onlookers. The sanctions also help show that history has an annoying habit, which historians encourage, of outting lies.

Alan Bliss is a historian of the modern U.S. His research is on metropolitan political economy, especially in Sunbelt cities. He is presently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Florida.

Was There a Schlieffen Plan?

Steven Cromack

In a 1999 journal article published in War in History, historian Terence Zuber dropped a bombshell on the academic community.  He argued that the Schlieffen Plan, or the German attack plan during World War I, was a post-war construction written by the generals to justify why the Germans lost the war.  He based his argument strictly on not only the primary sources that have been around since the War, but also new sources that became available with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Zuber’s individual pieces of evidence are circumstantial. Take all of it into consideration, however, and he makes a compelling case.  A few years later, he published a book on the topic with Oxford University Press (Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871-1914).

“The Schlieffen Plan” was the so-called German attack plan supposedly articulated by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff.  It was Germany’s roadmap to war—if all went according to “the Plan,” Germany would deliberately start World War I on their terms in 1916.  It called for rapid building of railroads across the country from West to East.  The attack would consist of the right wing invading Belgium and swing wide around Paris, striking the city from the West.  The left flank would remain stationary at Lorraine and hold off the likely French counterattack.  In the eyes of Schlieffen, France would surrender before they let anything happen to Paris.  Then, with France out of the war, the German army would utilize their new railroads, move its troops across the country to Eastern front, and knock out Russia.  As history “happened,” when entangling alliances ignited the so-called “powder keg,” and launched the War earlier than the Germans had hoped, the Schlieffen plan fell apart.  Schlieffen died, and his successor, Ludwig von Moltke not only inherited the Plan, but also altered it, or failed to understand it.  Von Moltke moved troops away from the West to bolster the Russian front.  “And the rest,” they say, “is history.”

Zuber challenged that history.  He wrote that there never was mention of a “Schlieffen Plan” before 1920.  Instead, he argued that when one historian wrote that Germany employed the wrong strategy, the generals and other members of the General staff, Kuhl, Ludendorff, Foerster and Groener, countered with the myth that Schlieffen had conveyed his master plan to Moltke, but that Moltke failed to understand it.  One should note that historians base their histories of the war on Ludendorff and others’ accounts.

According to Zuber, Schlieffen did have some contingency plans, although they remained in his possession until he died, and were not locked in the vault with the rest of the German war plans.  Zuber insisted that on its own, the Plan, or Denkschrift was a nightmare, poorly organized, and called for troop numbers that never existed.  Schlieffen’s war games, as evident in his writings and handwritten diagrams, did not resemble the master plan, or anything close to it.  Zuber based this argument on the newly discovered German staff memorandum, prepared by Major Wilhelm Dieckmann.  Dieckmann was a German officer whose task was to write a history of the war, and he therefore had access to many of Schlieffen’s notes, and war plans before Allied bombings during World War II destroyed them.  According to Zuber, Dieckmann’s manuscript revealed that Schlieffen’s “Plan” intended to keep the East strong and hold off the French by defeating their fortification line.  Schlieffen never envisioned swinging wide around the Paris and defeating the French army.  If this is true, then the Schlieffen Plan, as we know it, is wrong.

Zuber’s article and subsequent publications provoked a fifteen-year debate in War in History, especially between himself and historian Terence Holmes of Swansea University.  The debate over whether there was or whether there was not a Schlieffen Plan continues to this day.  The debate, however, has not reached high school history textbooks, or even undergraduate classes on European history.  It seems that historians are having trouble grappling with Zuber’s uncomfortable argument.  Why would they not?  He only insists that the academy has gotten World War I wrong for the last hundred years.  Such an assertion changes the interpretation and sequence of events.  Zuber writes that he seeks “establish German military history according to the standard of Leopold von Ranke: ‘as it actually was.’”  He, therefore, concluded his article, “There never was a ‘Schlieffen Plan.’”

For those interested in the heated debate in War in History thus far, here is the “Roundup” from Zuber’s website (http://www.terencezuber.com/):

T. Zuber, 'The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered' in: War in History, 1999; 3: pp. 262-
305.

T. Holmes, 'A Reluctant March on Paris', in: War in History, 2001; 2: pp. 208-32.

T. Zuber, 'Terence Holmes Reinvents the Schlieffen Plan' in: War in History 2001; 4,
pp. 468-76.

T. Holmes, 'The Real Thing' in: War in History, 2002, 1, pp. 111-20.

T. Zuber, 'Terence Holmes Reinvents the Schlieffen Plan - Again' in: War in History
2003; 1, pp. 92-101.

R. Foley, 'The Origins of the Schlieffen Plan' in: War in History, 2003; 2 pp. 222-32.

T. Holmes, 'Asking Schlieffen: A Further Reply to Terence Zuber' in: War in History
2003; 4, pp. 464-479.

T. Zuber, 'The Schlieffen Plan was an Orphan' in: War in History, 2004; 2 pp. 220-25.

R. Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’ in: War in History, 2006; 1, pp. 91-115.

T. Zuber, ‘The ‘Schlieffen  Plan’ and German War Guilt’ in: War in History, 2007; 1,
pp. 96-108.

A. Mombauer, ‘Of War Plans and War Guilt: The Debate Surrounding the Schlieffen
Plan’ in: Journal of Strategic Studies XXVIII, 2005.

T. Zuber, ‘Everybody Knows There Was a ‘Schlieffen Plan”: A Reply to Annika
Mombauer’ in War in History, 2008; 1. pp. 92-101.

G. Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan: New Sources on the History of German War
Planning’ in: War in History, 2008; 4, pp. 389-431.

T. Zuber, ‘There Never was a “Schlieffen Plan” (in preparation)

T. Holmes, ‘All Present and Correct: The Verifiable Army of the Schlieffen Plan’, in:
War in History, 2009, 16 (1) 98-115.

T. Zuber, ‘The Schlieffen Plan’s “Ghost Divisions” March Again:  A Reply to Terence
Holmes’ (in preparation)