BONUS: Historians and Their Publics

Daniel Story (0:04)

From the American Historical Review, I’m Daniel Story. You’re listening to a special edition of History In Focus. In this episode we’ll hear from 2021 AHA President Jacqueline Jones on her AHA presidential address, “Historians And Their Publics, Then and Now,” delivered on January 7th, 2022, at the AHA’s annual meeting in New Orleans. We’ll move back and forth between a conversation Jackie recorded with AHR editor Mark Bradley back in December and an abridged version of the address itself. To hear and see the full address, visit the American Historical Association’s YouTube channel. You can read the full text in the March 2022 issue of the AHR. We begin with Jackie’s opening remarks.

Jacqueline Jones address (1:01)

Thank you, Jim. That was very nice. Thank you so much, and welcome to you all. We’re so glad to see you here in these most challenging times. As you know, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the cancellation of last year’s meeting scheduled for Seattle. Today, the worldwide death toll from the disease has climbed to more than 5.4 million people, including the loss of more than 821,000 lives here in the United States. That we meet here in New Orleans seems particularly apt. Here is a port city with a rich multicultural history, shaped by international trade, cultural exchange, capitalist strivings, and mass immigration, in migration, voluntary and coerced. As we need we are reminded that aided and abetted by human actions, climate change and infectious diseases constitute some of the most powerful deadly forces shaping societies all over the globe, forces that abide no national boundaries. Present-day New Orleans occupies lands once called Bulbancha, Chocktaw for “a place of many languages.” This homeland of the Chitimacha served as a trade and transportation center for many different Indigenous peoples. Today, this land is home to, among other nations the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, the United Houma Nation, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, and the ille de John Shaw band. Beginning in the late 17th century, European nations colonized this area and through the centuries France, Spain, and the United States oversaw the buying and selling of an estimated 100,000 enslaved men, women, and children of native and African descent. Many of those forcibly removed from their African homelands came from regions that are today identified as Senegambia, Benin, Senegal and Ivory Coast as well as the vast interior of the continent. In the two years since the association last met in person, the United States has witnessed death on a massive scale and a contentious presidential election, an economic downturn and a spike in unemployment, and a violent attack on the nation’s capitol building by right-wing extremists determined to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power. Many authoritarian leaders, including those in the United States are actively engaged in controlling the narrative of their nation’s past by promoting myths and outlawing the teaching of certain subjects all together. As historians we are conscious of living through a time that will provide fodder for our future students’ textbooks, but this last line calls for a bit of revisionism. Textbooks remain a key element in high school and undergraduate history classes. However, the current widespread diffusion of historical knowledge would seem to vindicate those historians who over the generations have sought to engage a wider public, or rather multiple publics, and bring the insights gleaned from scholarly research to audiences outside the academy. Yet ironically, the proliferation of media dedicated to stories about the past has stoked an ongoing so-called culture war, threatening the way that history is presented and taught. This conflict effects historians, regardless of their workplace: K through 12 schools, galleries and museums, colleges and universities, historic houses and battlefields, and the federal government. Over the last half century, the AHA has undergone striking dramatic transformations in its leadership and its mission. And of course, it’s all to the good that people today encounter history in multiple lively and ubiquitous ways. At the same time, scholars must contend with the efforts among politicians and others with a political agenda to substitute fiction for historical fact. Though hardly new, these dangerous impulses remind us that the study of history remains a source of deep division among any number of publics in the United States and throughout the world.

Jacqueline Jones interview (5:50)

My name is Jacqueline Jones, and I’m the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History and the Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m an American historian, a historian of the United States. I focus on labor history, African American history, women’s history. And I’m currently President of the American Historical Association.

Mark Bradley (6:24)

So do you have a kind of like, I don’t know, elevator pitch for what the AHA is and what an AHA president does?

Jacqueline Jones interview (6:31)

After a whole year in the office, actually, I do not. But I will say that the American Historical Association is the world’s largest organization of professional historians representing all subfields and including people not only in the United States but around the world. And it is an advocate for historians of wherever they work—museums, universities, community colleges, for the US government. We seek to make sure that historians have adequate access to the archives they need, that they are able to pursue their research in a free and unfettered way, and that in general the discipline of history is promoted in various ways. We have many constituencies all over the world in terms of teachers, museum curators, as well as professors, tour guides at historical sites, filmmakers, and others who work in various venues.

Mark Bradley (7:44)

As president, what do you see your role as in taking those various initiatives forward?

Jacqueline Jones interview (7:50)

Well, I’m sort of the public face of the association along with Jim Grossman, the executive director. And at times, I craft statements that represent, at least according to the Executive Council, the views of the association related to a current issue of the day. I’m very happy to work with the wonderful AHA staff. (This is not a solo operation by any means.) And I remember the words of one of my predecessors, Mary Beth Norton, who told me when I took the job, she said, this is an honorific position. But it is more than that, because it does involve some work. So she said it’s an honor, but not purely honorific in terms of the kinds of work that we have to do day to day in overseeing what is really a very kind of complex organization involved in a lot of different initiatives.

Jacqueline Jones address (8:07)

The genre of the AHA presidential address is a strange one. Ranging anywhere from 3000 to 15,000 words, it can combine elements of the scholarly journal article, annual meeting panel presentation, autobiographical sketch, award acceptance speech, classroom lecture, after dinner booster club oration, and jeremiad. The address can be all these things, but rarely is just one of them. Though published in the American Historical Review, the address is first delivered in person at the annual meeting, and until 2014 at least, not sooner than eight in the evening, and sometimes after alcohol-infused dinners or receptions. For many years on a biannual basis, AHA presidents shared that time slot with their counterparts from the American Economic Association and the American Political Science Association. Beginning in the 1920s, the speeches followed the awarding of prizes, which meant that the AHA address might continue well into the night. Reading all the addresses and only them in chronological order presents the historian with a problematic assignment based on an unusual primary source. The speeches are easily accessible online, and they beckon to the reader who is curious about the views of a particular scholar, or the tenor of a particular time. But few people other than AHA presidents, I assume, sit down and read all 137 of them sequentially as I did last spring.

Mark Bradley (10:50)

One of the things that you say about yourself in the address is that you’re a kind of improbable reader (those are the terms that you use). How did you decide to read every presidential address since the first one in 1884? And can you kind of paint us a picture a little bit of how that started and what the process of reading was like for you?

Jacqueline Jones interview (11:13)

Yes, well, when I began to think about my own address, I thought I should go back and review what other people had done and little did I know what a task that would turn out to be. The addresses, of course, began in 1884 with the founding of the association and there has been one a year ever since. And they range in length from about 3000 words to 15,000 words.

Jacqueline Jones address (11:41)

The addresses play off against each other. Some presidents took the occasion to respond directly to the comments of their predecessor, exchanges that must have inspired mixed murmurings of ascent and descent among the audiences. One prominent historian declared his attention to pay his disrespects to another, or others. One speaker might call upon historians to emulate the ancients, the next to forget the ancients. One might urge historians to offer moral judgments of the historical figures they studied, another to refrain from such judgments. One might offer lessons from history, only to be followed by one who declared flatly that there are no lessons to be learned from history.

Jacqueline Jones interview (12:29)

So I called myself an improbable reader, because I think it’s very unusual for someone to sit down and read these addresses sequentially. Anybody who’s interested in the AHA would not limit their reading to the addresses, which is what I did, I really read them as a very discreet body of evidence. And that was unusual. And I consider myself giving an improbable reading to these addresses.

Mark Bradley (13:00)

As you were writing this, you say early on in the piece that you’re influenced by this broader AHA project that’s going on right now to essentially try to come to terms with racism within the organization and the ways in which the AHA and what it does might have helped to foster a sort of racist narrative of the American past. So I wonder if you could say just a little bit about that AHA initiative, and then where you see the address perhaps supporting those efforts.

Jacqueline Jones interview (13:28)

Yes, my study of the addresses is just a small piece, I think, of this larger project to investigate the history of the AHA, and the way it has or has not promoted racist narratives about the past. I began reading the addresses thinking that I would find kind of egregious examples of prejudice against women, people of color, but in fact I found a lot of silences. I found out that these groups were presumably not even worth discussing, not even worth mentioning.

Jacqueline Jones address (14:07)

As historical agents, or even otherwise, people of color and women of all colors lacked much of a presence in presidential addresses for many years. The names of women qua historical actors or historians were few and far between before the late 1980s. In 1887, Justin Windsor mentioned Mercy Warren, the historian of the American Revolution, but dismissed her work as far from learned in its details. Worthington C. Ford in an address title “The Editorial Function in U.S. History,” cited Eliza Susan Quincy, editor of Josiah Quincy’s memoir, but singled her out for doing an awful job, doctoring, altering, omitting and mutilating the text. The addresses were replete with gendered language, often in service of negative sentiments. When Carl Bridenbaugh wanted to disparage the econometricians and others who relied heavily on quantitative data, he referred to quantification as that “Bitch-goddess.” Charles M. Andrews suggested pure objectivity produced a kind of history akin to a “grim, worldly old hag.” Not [un]expectedly, several of the addresses mentioned Clio, the Muse of History, at times is stand in for the helpful secretary, or Morison’s long-suffering wife. The American and the historian were almost always white and male.

Attendees at the annual meeting did not hear an address that featured Latin America until 1932, nearly half a century after the association’s founding, with Herbert E. Bolton urged his colleagues to study the two thirds of the western hemisphere of Hispanic origin. John K. Fairbank was the first ha president to devote an address to China in 1968. Joseph Miller was the first president in 1998 to talk at length about the history of Africa. Vicky Ruiz broke new ground in 2015 with her address, “Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions,” when she described Hispanic women’s contributions to the US labor movement. Missing from the speeches of Americanists was attention to Indigenous history, and to Indigenous people in general, except to the extent that in the words of William F. Poole, “savages” in the form of “Indian scalping parties,” his words, proved a hindrance to the westward march of civilization. Although several presidents mentioned enslaved and disenfranchised black people, no one before John Hope

Franklin in 1979 considered black men and women as historical actors in their own right. Not until Thomas Holt delivered his address in 1994 did any AHA president tackle the fraught history of racial ideologies, filling an intellectual vacuum of more than 131 years—this while American history was the chief topic of many addresses. It took a black historian to consider the subject of black history, and it also took a woman—Natalie C. Davis—to posit women as subjects worth studying in her discussion of several women historians from the 18th through the 20th centuries. These long standing voids were part of a larger trend. The silence among many presidents who effectively erased not only the histories of specific groups, but also the political and social upheavals of their own day. For example, a cluster of addresses in the 1960s ignore the ferment of war in protest, engulfing many societies, rebellions that many presidents no doubt with witnessed firsthand just by looking outside their office windows.

Indeed, it is striking that so many historians in the third quarter of the 20th century made no mention of the Black Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the drive for the rights of Mexican American farmworkers or for gay rights, or the protests of Indigenous groups.

Several presidents of this period decry the proliferation of specialized studies that focused on specific places and marginalized peoples. In a related vein in 1985, William H. McNeill identified what he believed was a mark trend in scholarship since the 1960s: the history of people of color and women. And it was a concern for him that historians engaged in this effort were themselves people of color and women. The danger in such a trend, he opined, was the scholars who studied a group to which they belong, had a vested interest in portraying that group in a favorable light, a suggestion perhaps, ironically, demonstrated by the addresses delivered by the AHA’s first eighty white men presidents.

Mark Bradley (19:13)

McNeill has these discussions, as you talk about them, about the kind of special pleading and how is it possible that people who their own identity is wrapped up in the groups that they’re studying can you know have a kind of purchase on the past without, you know, thinking that his own positionality of course, would affect the ways in which he did his work as well. But as you were encountering in McNeill talking about that and others, and thinking about your own work, you know, how did you kind of see your way through that?

Jacqueline Jones interview (19:43)

Yes, I found that statement by McNeill to be very problematic for a variety of reasons. One is he assumes that only people of color will write the history of people of color. Only women will write Women’s History. And he says that when people from a certain group write their own history, they engage in a kind of special pleading. They want to provide an idealistic view of the group. They’re going to lose their scholarly objectivity in the process. And he calls into question these kinds of histories altogether.

Jacqueline Jones address (20:29)

According to McNeill, flattering historiography—that’s what he called it—could serve as an incentive for the group in question to come closer to living up to its noblest ideals. But this kind of mythmaking risked yielding two unfortunate outcomes: self delusion on the part of the group in question, and a kind of group identity that disrupted the national civic order. The Cold War, which demanded of US citizens a single mindedness a purpose, was not the time, he said, for subnational groups to acquire historiography replete with oppressors living next door, and perchance still enjoying the fruits of past and justices. And some parochial historiography, again, his term, including specialized studies, heighten the chances of internal political conflict when the US could least afford it. A general attack on specialization was a code then for the so-called new social history. So as a parenthetical observation, I’ll just note that my first two books, published in 1980 and 1985, violated many of these prescriptions against specialized studies and attention to women and other marginalized groups.

Mark Bradley (22:01)

The last part of the address goes to the kind of increasing presence of online archival and print materials. But it also goes to a whole set of kind of public facing engagements in history around digital humanities platforms, sometimes through community activism, exhibitions, and that sort of thing. I wonder if you could just say a little bit about that trend, which is one that you know, you clearly wanted to lift up, and what kind of implications do you think that has for the profession and also for teaching and doing history in our moment?

Jacqueline Jones interview (22:38)

Yes, well, I think there are two sides to this fairly recent story. One is the very lively and multifaceted ways that people encounter history anymore, through TV shows, through Broadway plays, on the Internet, through news sources, through genealogical work, historic sites. I mean, history is everywhere. And historians have been very creative and enterprising in getting the word out about the latest historical scholarship. And that’s something that we can be proud of. You know, in the early days, the publics for historians seem to be very limited.

They were our students, they were ourselves. They were other scholars, and they were a kind of general amorphous public. But today, we reach lots of different kinds of publics in lots of different ways. Again, ways that are creative, entertaining, far-reaching. So that’s all to the good and no other historian who gave a presidential address had mentioned that—this kind of blossoming of the historical enterprise in terms of outreach to various publics and the technological platforms that we use to do that now. So that’s great.

Jacqueline Jones address (24:05)

A survey of multiple venues for historical scholarship and interpretation reveals a wide array of the ways that non-academics encounter history every day. With massive digitized collections available on public sites such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian, and a plethora of state and local historical societies, scholars and non-scholars alike can review the country’s founding documents, as well as specialized materials. Major news outlets, whether print, TV, or online, regularly interview professional historians to provide context for current events. The news site Politico has a regular feature called “The History Department.” The Washington Post carries regular features that illuminate the past. Made by History consists of opinion pieces by historians. And Retropolis often explores some facet of history in the Chesapeake region. In 2018, The New York Times began a recurring feature of obituaries of notable persons who were deemed unworthy of notice at the time they died, a series now called “Overlooked,” including such figures as the anti-lynching activists, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and also the writer Charlotte Bronte.

Jacqueline Jones interview (24:39)

On the other hand, that has provoked a kind of backlash so that those who are not inclined to embrace an inclusive history, one that includes lots of different groups, lots of different kinds of people, have reacted in very dramatic ways. Because history is no longer confined to the classroom, to the museum, to the textbook, to the battlefield. It’s all over the news. It’s on TV, it’s in the movies, it’s in plays, it’s in your family’s DNA. It’s all over, and some have, as I said, reacted negatively to that. I suggest that it wasn’t a coincidence that President Trump appointed his 1776 Commission soon after Nicole Hannah Jones edited the 1619 Project for The New York Times. That wasn’t a coincidence. What seemed to be happening, I said here, was that scholarship, rigorous scholarship about the past, had spilled out of the Ivory Tower and into the streets. And certain groups took notice and became alarmed that they could not control the narrative about the nation’s past.

Jacqueline Jones address (26:57)

It is not only higher education that register the effects of a politicized skepticism toward experts and scholarly expertise. Public K through 12 schools have long been sites of bitter conflict with state legislators, school administrators, teachers, parents, and students, clashing over racial integration, curricular matters, the teaching of evolution, the role of athletics, free speech, and students privacy rights among other issues. Yet in the Fall of 2021, local school board meetings assumed a new and even violent tone, as some parents protested vaccine and mask mandates, and also objected to the teaching of what they mistakenly called Critical Race Theory, the theory which originated in law schools focused on racial prejudice and practices embedded in institutions and structures. It was not part of the K through 12 public school curriculum. In this hyper partisan time a heroic, romantic view of the country’s founding, achieved renewed expression and public denunciations of a more inclusive history. The timing was no coincidence when in 2020 President Trump appointed a 1776 Commission immediately after the publication of The New York Times’ 1619 Project. The swift backlash against the project in some quarters represented a strenuous effort to deny or ignore key aspects of America’s past. But the fact that the 1619 Project existed at all was testament to the increasingly vital role that historians were playing in public discourse. Scholarship had spilled out of the Ivory Tower and into the streets. The 1776 report reprise the old canard that teaching an inclusive historical narrative somehow threatens patriotism, the family, private property, capitalism, and the noble ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. With no authors listed and no historians of the United States on the commission, the report was riddled with errors and risible assertions, for example, comparing Progressive Era social settlement workers and anti child labor activists with European fascists, and charging that American universities were hotbeds of radical subversion. At the state level, this reactionary effort has manifested itself in legislation that outlaws ill-defined divisive concepts (the subject of our plenary for tomorrow night by the way) and turned parents into vigilantes authorized to sue teacher suspected of mentioning Critical Race Theory. In the crosshairs were materials dealing with a history of slavery, white supremacy, and racist violence. In some states, a well-founded sense of paranoia grip not only K through 12 public school teachers, but also instructors and public community colleges and universities where the vague wording of legislation cast a shadow over assigned readings, lectures, and class discussions. As state employees faculty at these institutions felt particularly vulnerable under circumstances that evoke the hysteria of the McCarthy Era.

In response to these and other challenges to the study and teaching of history, the AHA has engaged in robust advocacy work, extending its reach to multiple publics within the realm of history, research, and teaching ,publics not envisioned by the early presidents of the association: K through 12, teachers, archivists and museum curators, historians working within the academy and non-teaching jobs, citizens engaged in the renaming of streets and buildings and the removal of statues, independent scholars, graduate students hoping to find a job outside the academy, undergraduates in history survey courses, adjuncts and contract workers laboring under exploitative conditions, scholars in foreign countries prosecuted and persecuted for their research, college and university history departments threatened with closure, and conference goers harassed and threatened by online trolls. The AHA regularly denounces threats to academic freedom as well as measures designed to deny historians access to records and archives. The association provides historical context to national controversies, including those related to gay rights, gay marriage, reproductive rights, censorship of historical materials and findings, controversial statues and building names, police brutality in the United States, and the destruction of government records. It also joins with other scholarly organizations in advocacy efforts. In 2020, the AHA Statement on the “History of Racist Violence,” prompted by the murder of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, garnered the support of 97 scholarly groups representing many different subfields of history, as well as several other disciplines. The AHA routinely cooperates with peer associations organized into, for example, the Council of Learned Societies and the Learning from History Coalition. So in 2021, the AHA maintained a Facebook page, Twitter feed, and Instagram account. It provided educators at all levels with bibliographies, historical perspectives on a range of issues, and webinars on teaching difficult subjects. The American Historical Review reflected the reality of these new media, sponsoring podcasts and initiating a community engaged history feature.

The History Unclassified initiative, quote seeks to explore new modes of historical production, and to experiment with novel means of creating narratives about the past.

Thus, the early 2020s highlighted the countervailing forces related to the study and teaching of history. On the one hand, a robust discipline distinguished by the creativity and public outreach on the part of professionals with history more than ever, a lively presence in the lives of many of Americans. And, on the other hand, a discipline and a profession under siege by hero worshipers, cynical politicians, and institutional budget cutters. By making history available to all sorts of publics, scholars seek to counter mythmaking and contribute to a broader educational enterprise, one that is essential to the future of the discipline and, indeed, to the future of democracy itself. Are we on the road to the state-sponsored repression of historical facts, or to a greater public awareness of the complexity of the past? My successors will be able to tell.

Jacqueline Jones interview (34:47)

I think by reading these presidential addresses we really get a sense of humility. I did. I felt humble reading these addresses, not because our predecessors weren’t necessarily smarter or more enlightened than we are, but because I thought what will happen in 100 years? When people go back to read my address and the recent addresses, they’ll probably criticize me for my use of language, my terminology, they’ll suggest why weren’t we looking at certain archival collections that were hidden in plain sight? Or why weren’t we looking at particular subjects?

Weren’t we all very primitive here in the 21st century?

Jacqueline Jones address (35:36)

The study of history remains a work in progress, and regardless of our time period or specialty, I think that all of us in this room can no doubt agree that contributing to that work remains a privilege and an honor for us all. Thank you, and stay safe.

Daniel Story (36:03)

That was Jacqueline Jones on her AHA presidential address, “Historians and Their Publics, Then and Now.” You heard portions of the address itself delivered at the AHA annual meeting in New Orleans on January 7th, 2022, and a conversation about that address between Jackie and AHR editor Mark Bradley. For the full address in print, see the March 2022 issue of the AHR. And for a video from the event, visit the American Historical Association’s YouTube channel. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association, and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story, with audio engineering assistance from Myles Rider-Alexis. For more information about the episode, including an episode transcript, visit americanhistoricalreview.org. Hope you enjoyed this bonus episode. See you next time.