John Fea's Virtual Office Hours

Randall Stephens

Historical Society member, Springsteen disciple, and historian extraordinaire John Fea recently launched a series of videos called "Virtual Office Hours" from his blog The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

So far he's created four clips.  In these Fea discusses some of the concepts that animate a course he teaches on historical methods.  Listen to Fea discuss "The Past is a Foreign Country," "In Search of a Usable Past," "Are Historians Revisionists?" and "How Do Historians Think?"

Fea does a wonderful job of explaining concepts like historicism, Whig history, and the much-misunderstood/maligned revisionism.  Students of history, and their profs, too, would do well to watch these.  And many of us who teach courses on historiography, methods, and the like could take a page out of Fea's playbook here.

Perhaps the next step would be to get students to use technology to engage the concepts and themes introduced in a methods class.  Maybe they could make group-project videos that explore the uses and abuses of the past, the role that history plays in forming policy, how our understanding of the past changes from one generation to the next, and more. 

Index for September Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

It will be a little bit before readers have the latest issue of Historically Speaking in hand, but in the meantime have a look at what will be between the covers.  The September 2012 issue will feature conversations with historians James Banner, Ilya Grinberg, George H. Nash, and Andrew Lambert.  It also includes essays on race and religion, colonial Britain, and religion and politics as well as a two forums on war.

David Lowenthal's "The Past Made Present" is the lead essay.  He explores themes laid out in the 2nd edition of his forthcoming Cambridge University Press book The Past Is a Foreign Country. Writes Lowenthal:

Branson, Mo, theme park Silver Dollar City. Photo by Stephens, August 2012.

Two opposing attitudes dominate recent discourse on the use and misuse of history. Many take refuge in the past as an antidote to present disappointments and future fears. They hark back nostalgically or formulaically to the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome burdens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsed immediacy and certitude, in some Golden Age of classical serenity, Christian faith, pastoral plenitude, or childhood innocence. Sojourning in the past seems preferable to living in the present.

And given the mounting surfeit of heritage sites and structures, more and more of the past is accessible. Critics find the collective legacy crushingly voluminous, backward looking, and crippling to present enterprise. Fifty years ago architectural historian Reyner Banham condemned “the load of obsolete buildings that Europe is humping along on its shoulders [as] a bigger drag on the live culture of our continent than obsolete nationalisms or obsolete moral codes.” The load is now heavier. In much of England one feels hardly ever out of sight of a listed building, a protected archaeological site, a museum-worthy work of art. The treasured past is said to overwhelm French culture and politics. “Everything is indiscriminately conserved and archived,” notes a historian of the patrimony. “We no longer make history,” charges Jean Baudrillard. “We protect it like an endangered masterpiece.” The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls preservation a dangerous epidemic. Noting that UNESCO and similar bodies sequester one-sixth of the Earth’s surface, with more to come, he terms heritage a metastasizing cancer.

The popular alternative to wallowing in the past is to dismiss it entirely. The past has ever-diminishing salience for lives driven by today’s feverish demands and delights. The sensory-laden penchant for computer gaming, coupled with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, betoken a here-and-now environment dominated by raw sensations, in which “we live perpetually in the present.” Being up-to-date now not only matters most, it is all that matters; knowing or understanding the past is an impediment in the present rat race. . . .

Historically Speaking (September 2012):

The Past Made Present

David Lowenthal

British Perspectives on the War of 1812

The War of 1812 in the Grand Sweep of Military History

Jeremy Black

“Faithful History”: British Representations of the War of 1812

Andrew D. Lambert

The Naval War of 1812: An Interview with Andrew Lambert

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

From Light to White: The Place and Race of Jesus in Antebellum America

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey

Freedom Betrayed: An Interview with George H. Nash about Herbert Hoover’s Magnum Opus

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Along the Hindu Kush: Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest Frontier

Kenneth W. Harl

The Soviet Air Force in World War II

Out of the Blue: The Forgotten Story of the Soviet Air Force in World War II

Von Hardesty

Red Phoenix Rising: An Interview with Ilya Grinberg

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

In Search of the City on a Hill  

Richard Gamble

On Being a Historian: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr.

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

The Past Is a Foreign Country

Dan Allosso

So I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Keene New Hampshire, writing a biography of freethinker Charles Knowlton.  I’m doing a chronological first draft; there’s plenty of detail, background, explanation, and interpretation that I’ll need to add to this, but I figured getting down the skeleton of the story is the first step.

Pun not intended, but there it is.  I’m writing about the first time Knowlton goes up to the “medical lectures” in Hanover (they formed the basis of what later became Dartmouth Medical School).  The fourteen-week lectures cost $50, which neither Knowlton nor his traveling companion Herman Partridge could scrape together.  So the two men decided to steal a body, since it was an open secret that Hanover paid $50 for “subjects” they could use in anatomy lectures.

This was probably Knowlton’s idea.  He had already stolen a body and gotten away with it by this time.  He was 22; his companion Partridge was 31.  Ironically, Partridge later became the Coroner of their home-town Templeton, Massachusetts.  They found one body, but it was badly decomposed when they got to it and only yielded a skeleton.  Then they heard of another burial, ten miles in the wrong direction.  Desperate (the lectures had already commenced and they were missing them!), they went out in the night and stole this body too.

Carrying the corpse into Keene, where I now sit writing about it, Partridge was sure they had been discovered.  Their wagon was old and their horse slow.  They had to get out and push when they went up hills.  Certainly there would be no chance of an escape, if they were caught.  Partridge’s panic, however, was premature.  They avoided the town and tavern, staying the night with a farmer who had lived in Templeton.  The eighty-mile trip took them three days, and when they arrived in Hanover, the corpse was unusable and the anatomy professor was not buying.  But he gave them $20 to dispose of the body.

As I write these events, I find myself trying to imagine what Keene looked like in 1822.  What it was like to drive an old wagon over country paths, taking three days to make a trip we can now accomplish in two hours.  And I hope that, since it’s interesting to me, it will be to my readers when I satisfy my own curiosity and fill in these details.

For every sentence of narrative, it seems as if there’s another sentence of explanation and context.  So it’s not just that these things happened in this particular sequence, but that they happened in this alien world where you can’t pass over the meaning of carrying a body through town at a snail’s pace.  The suspense would go on for a much longer time, if people on horseback or even running on foot could catch up to you.  The anxiety that someone was going to smell the foul thing decaying under the covers in the wagon must have built to an extreme level, when hours passed under the hot sun as the old horse trudged on.

But here I sit, in an air-conditioned café.  The past really is a foreign country . . .