Speculating on Humanity

I just finished listening to Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello as an audiobook. I use audiobooks for my commute, exercise, cleaning, crafting, etc. The few history books I've tried in this format have emphatically not worked as audiobooks (especially compared to fiction). Their narrative structure is simply too diffuse to follow while listening.

I would like to comment briefly on Gordon-Reed's amazing book as a non-specialist (for others who thought it was amazing, see the Pulitizer and National Book Award committees, among others).

First of all it is highly enjoyable as a read (all 30 hours of it). I think this is one of the first requirements for attention from major award committees, and something that historians fail to achieve all too often (though I think we achieve it much more often than other humanities and social sciences).

Beyond simple enjoyment, the book raises several fascinating issues. Two that I was struck by was the way that Gordon-Reed focuses on the humanity of the Hemingses and the way that she uses speculation to do this. It is my perception that speculative history has automatically been a sign of poor history, but Gordon-Reed's work should disprove this assumption. She uses intensely careful research to craft a skeleton of facts from which she hangs human flesh. Perhaps we all do this in our writing, without admitting it, but I couldn't count the number of times that Gordon-Reed starts sentences with "perhaps" and its synonyms. She laid out the evidence she had, the historical context around it, and then suggested possible reasons individuals might have acted in such a way. This is particularly forceful in her situation. We have perhaps more information on the Hemingses than any other slave family in American history, and yet even with that there are large gaps in our knowledge. Gordon-Reed fills in those gaps by carefully correlating dates, extrapolating from other evidence, analyzing naming patterns, and sometimes suggesting what a teenage girl or adult man might have done in such a circumstance (given what we know of their personalities in that time). She is also not afraid to suggest several different interpretations.

Gordon-Reed uses so much speculation because her primary interest is in recreating the lives of the different Hemingses as individuals with emotions, hopes for the future, plans, family connection, and impulses. She argues at one point that “throughout American history there has been a tendency to see African Americans as symbols or representations rather than as human beings. Even when specific details about an individual life are available for interpretation, those details are often ignored or dismissed in favor of falling back on all the supposed verities about black life and black people in general. For African Americans, social history almost invariably overwhelms biography, obscuring the contingencies within personal lives which are the very things historians and biographers usually rely upon to reconstruct events and lives.” Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 290.

As someone elbow deep in writing a collective biography of black intellectuals, I find her argument incredibly coercive. Someone might point out the numerous biographies of African American leaders in reaction to her point. Some of these do achieve a human portrait (Levering-Lewis on Du Bois springs to mind), but all too many fit more neatly within the impossibly perfect--or tragically flawed--leader troupe. I hope that I will be able to achieve as compelling a portrait as Gordon-Reed has, though stylistically with fewer "perhaps."

Of course, her greatest accomplishment is in reassessing the Thomas Jefferson-Sallie Hemings relationship, particularly within the context of Hemings' extended family. She emphatically discounts the extremes who would argue that either Jefferson was a demi-god (and who cannot stand the thought that he might have had sex with, let alone love, a black woman) or that Jefferson was a monstrous racist, who is an easy stand in for all white racists. He was a product of his time and his internal life discounted and contrasted with many of his public statements. And he chose in most circumstances to avoid conflict and make those around him love him rather than engaging in direct confrontation or violence. The evidence that Gordon-Reed amasses does indeed suggest that Jefferson's relationship with several of the Hemingses was amicable, while constraned by the dictates of a slave society. She is a brave woman to take on this thesis.

Tim's Light Reading (5/5/09)

1. McNamara on Maritain: Few people realize that Jacques Maritain spent over 15 years living in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Pat's brief post emphasizes Maritain's Catholicism, but the latter's influences on neo-Thomism, as an international movement, and neo-Aristotelianism were profound.

2. McLemee on Comments and Online Writing: Scott McLemee reflects on the hazards of online intellectual life in an age where everyone thinks of her/himself as important, as part of the conversation. [Amendment: Scott objected to the wording of my pointer sentence. I should've emphasized "thinks of" to convey the notion that simple human vices and virtues, namely false pride and appropriate humility, need to be a part of one's consideration when commenting. Otherwise you risk being a jerk who deserves scorn when you seek to be a part of the conversation.]

3. Dana McCourt and Eric Rauchway on Philosophy and the Humanities, here (1) and here (2): Both reflect on expectations about philosophy, and theoretical aspects of the humanities and social sciences, in the public sphere. Ultimately, both McCourt and Rauchway are concerned with variants of anti-intellectualism.

4. Reflections on C.P. Snow's 1959 "Two Cultures" Lecture, here (The Telegraph) and here (NYT): Although Snow was a Briton, his lecture was a popular sensation around the English-speaking world---for different reasons. Snow was concerned with a peculiarly British problem of the 1950s: bright kids being pushed into the literary/traditional intellectual directions, and the less bright into the sciences. In the U.S., however, post-Sputnik (i.e. 1957), the high-test-result kids were pushed into the sciences and the rest were left to their own devices, no matter their intellectual worth (whether literature, industrial labor, or the service sector). While the NYT piece supplies something of the American reception of Snow's lecture and eventually gets to the British context out of which Snow arose, it is quite presentist in its analysis. As such, The Telegraph article is better for historical context (British and otherwise). In some ways the NYT piece is a brief, transnational intellectual history of the lecture, while Robert Whelan's Telegraph article is a more complete "nationalist" analysis. The latter is better intellectual history.

is it just me...?

...or is there a pronounced trend lately against people speaking and writing about the past, in the past tense?

I notice this tic most often when grading student papers, in which those under my tutelage nearly always write things like, "Ames begins his career," rather than "Ames began." But I've also seen it frequently in History Channel-type documentaries, on which the academic talking head will say, presumably to add a sense of gripping immediacy to an event that happened long ago, something along the lines of "Booth jumps onto the stage and shouts, 'Sic semper tyrranis!'"

I have seen this mode of speaking creep into conference presentations and, yes, my own course lectures. And it's no longer used only for sudden or discrete events, but also in statements like "after Vietnam and Watergate, Americans begin to lose confidence in their country." This style appears to be very quickly becoming the standard way of speaking about history, and even writing about it, at least informally.

Assuming that this trend actually exists, the question is whether it is in any way significant: I mean, everyone knows you're speaking about the past, right? So where's the harm? I'm not sure there is any, but I'll admit that it does bother me. I think that my problem is that, if a style that originally served to make the past more immediate has now become standard, then a) it will no longer serve the function for which it was adopted, and b) the distinction formerly made by the older formulation will become lost. Such developments would inevitably impoverish the way that we think.

At the heart of my nagging concern is the fact that students seem to write this way, not for dramatic effect, but as a matter of course. It reminds me of people learning a new foreign language, in which tense distinctions are too difficult and subtle, so everything comes out in the present tense. And I shudder to think of the day that my French or Spanish is anyone's model for speaking about history.