Rethinking Good History

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 10, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

Political correctness has poisoned the study of history, but a new professional organization dedicated to eliminating intellectual and ideological fluff Is coming to the rescue.

In the latter half of the 20th century, history itself fell into disrepute. Like so many academic disciplines, history at American universities suffered considerably in quality. But there is a revival, and in the 21st century history once again may be about what really happened rather than being obsessed, ever increasingly, with issues of race, gender and class. This was the unholy trinity of concerns inherited from New Left politics -- to the exclusion of most everything else.

Increasingly, too, much older fields within the discipline, such as military and diplomatic history, were ignored or abandoned as uninteresting and worthless or, worse, accused of acting as factors abetting the white-male domination of society and therefore part of the old order that had to be overthrown.

Along with the extreme politicization of history went a precipitous decline in the quality of historical writing. Clarity and elegance of style were denounced as suspect and accused of a host of errors: disguising reality, covering over all the wrongs done those not in power and justifying the wealth and position of those who were.

What to do? Well, one thing was to create an organization that countered the politically correct status quo of the profession. That was what such renowned historians as Eugene Genovese, his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese who teaches at Emory University, Alan Kors and Marc Tractenburg of the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University's Donald Kagan and numerous others did in 1998, forming the Historical Society as an alternative for historians to the totally PC American Historical Association, the premier professional organization in the field.

The Historical Society's goals are big ones -- "to avoid the ideological fluff" that characterizes the current emphasis on race, gender and class is one of them, Genovese, president of the group, tells Insight. Its goals also include fostering intellectual openness, nurturing those fields (diplomatic and military history) that have fallen into disrepute and encouraging good writing.

The Historical Society now has 1,500 members (including professors and graduate students of all political stripes) and is growing. Last May it had its first convention (in Boston). Reportedly the best-attended session was a meeting devoted to a discussion of the book On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace by Kagan -- a subject that almost is unthinkable for an American Historical Association convention. Memorial Day weekend 2000 will see another. The group recently published a collection of essays, aptly named Reconstructing History, edited by Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, a professor at Syracuse University.

At this year's convention, Genovese, a former Marxist radical and author of numerous books on the American South and slavery, challenged the American Historical Association and the other leading professional group, the Organization of American Historians, about their much-touted policies of "diversity."

"When was the last time they elected to office anyone known to be right of center, or anyone, no matter how far to the left, who is in bad odor with the radical feminists?" he asked. "How many Republicans have served on their councils and committees in the last decade?" Genovese mentioned asking one of the leaders of the other organizations about whether an opponent of abortion could be nominated for office in her organization and was told: "You know that would be impossible."

But above all, what the Historical Society's interested in is good history. Genovese laments that the rapid decline in the quality of history turned out by academic historians occurred at a time when more and more Americans were reading more history than ever.

For the most part, of course, they were reading independent historians not associated with universities, such as Barbara Tuchman, or turning to the great historians of the past, such as Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -- still a popular read after two centuries -- recently was republished in an impressive new edition.

About academic history, Genovese is optimistic. "In history, the opposite of Gresham's Law is at work, weeding out the fluff. Ten or 20 years from now all this stuff that takes race, gender and class into consideration will be regarded as a joke. It's the good stuff that survives."