A brief note on history

Was the Jamestown settlement the first step in the great American experiment or was it the first of many colonialist land-grabs by an imperialist monolith? Was the Vietnam war a patriot's battle to maintain a free society by quelling the spread of communism or was it a neo-colonialist attempt to force liberalism down the throats of those unfortunate enough not have been born in a contemporary democracy?

These questions, and countless others like them, foreground the simple fact that 'history' is, counter to what many unreflectively believe, not the simple collection of fact or chronology. 'History', it turns out, needs to be done by people. People, it turns out, have at best partial perspectives informed by particular circumstances such as culture, race, gender, class, age, political affiliation, sexuality, etc. There is, therefore, no 'God's-eye view' of history that can stand outside of the various perspectives that inform our understanding of history and give some final, ultimate picture of what happened in our past.

The fact that partial perspective can affect the way a person understands something is not new. Historiography, the study of the methodologies employed by historians, has long emphasized the need to locate one's own perspective when doing 'history'. In fact, were you to join a graduate department in history, you would study historiography well before you ever tried to study past events.

Recognition of partial perspective, however, does not mean that we ought not strive toward objectivity when we do history. Nor does it mean that we cannot say of one historical account that is better or worse than another. An historiographical approach that foregrounds perspective can, in fact, make a strong claim to objectivity via the inclusion of as many perspectives as possible. Through this inclusivity a kind of triangulation may be possible and the resultant history may have a stronger claim on the 'truth'. Inclusivity in historiography is important. George Santayana's (a philosopher!) famous quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." becomes all the more striking when one sees the dangers of building exclusive dominant perspectives into the way we see past events. A thoroughly inclusive picture that represents a multiplicity of perspectives is required to get a grasp on just what the 'past' is. Making sure that we 'remember' past mistakes in ways that don't reify existing power dynamics is surely a necessary component to making sure that we don't repeat them.

If you haven't already, go out and read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Read it, love it, know it. Then, should a random bout of masochism strike, go out and read Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States. These two books, the latter of which is a direct reaction to the former, which was in turn a direct reaction to the trite that is still being shoveled down the throats of grade-school history students everywhere, demonstrate perfectly the power and pervasiveness of perspective in doing history.