Civic ignorance, writes Newsweek‘s Anthony Romano, is nothing new. But in today’s globalized economy, a lack of basic knowledge about basic history and public affairs is damaging America’s ability to compete with foreign countries such as China, India, and Oregon.

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Olbermann Quotes:

“The 150th anniversary of, you know, treason and defense of servitude and murder and suicide, billed as a joyous night of fun, dancing, food and drink… Don’t forget the silent slave auction.”

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, treasonous secession that started the Civil War and was the direct result of slavery, happy birthday to you.”

“And as part of the continuing historical revisionism that tries to claim the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, the secession celebrations have begun. Yay, treason, yay.”

The thing about Olbermann is, you have to know when he is being, well Olbermann… Anyway.

However, it is an interesting question. With the Sesquicentennial, how do we remember the war?

The debates will rage about the cause(s) of the Civil War, could the South have won, why did the North win, ect. There are also heated discussion over who fought, why they fought, and why some didn’t fight? The motives and the experiences!

So, should we “celebrate” the event? The question’s answer seems obvious to me, nothing to celebrate. Olbermann was right, as much as it pains me to say that, the Civil War was a tragedy and the institution of slavery was as well. No balls, banquets or dinner parties, please. Remember it, study it and learn from it. Let’s not break down the nuances of the word “celebrate,” we know what the word stands for. We should not remember the Civil War like we “celebrate” the 4th of July, right?

But it seems I am in the minority here, do a simple Google search for the Civil War and Celebration and the results are troubling! Lots of Celebrating going on! Oh well…

From the article:

The site of the “auction,” the Old Court House, has a long history related to the slave trade. It was the site of public auctions of all kinds of property at sheriff’s sales, usually in the course of settling estates or enforcing court orders for damages stemming from lawsuits. The Old Court House was also the site of the first hearing of the infamous Dred Scott case.

The auction, as expected” drew some criticism. If you’re interested here it is:

I think the intentions were good and the presentation effective.

It is very easy for academic historians to mock this special need, and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, as a staff writer for The New Yorker, is an expert at mocking. Her new book, which mingles discussions of the present-day Tea Party movement with scattershot accounts of the Revolution, makes fun of the Tea Party people who are trying to use the history of the Revolution to promote their political cause. From her point of view, “What would the founders do?” is an “ill-considered” and “pointless” question.

As Wood notes, for Lepore the ideas behind these movements are a kind of historical “fundamentalism” that wishes to look back and to somehow teleport or transport today to yesterday, or in this sense to the great past. To conjure up the past in this way means, for Lepore, that it is the ultimate in the simplification and dumbing down of history so as to accept that women could not vote and blacks were slaves (as was the case in 1776). That to look back and ask what the Founder’s would do is an obtuse act. Therefore as Wood observes, throughout her book Lepore’s implicitly asks “Don’t these Tea Party people realize how silly they are?”

So, perhaps, for Academic snobs such as Lepore the only good movement is a Liberal movement? Anyway, a very interesting review of what looks like an interesting, though probably flawed, book that I can’t wait to read.

Not a lot apparently… SO TIRED of college elites talking down to high school teachers. They need to get their act together! I wonder how many of these students know about “social justice”?

Americans “want to look to a common past.” But the idea of a unified-in-purpose nation, she says, “has its origins in 19th-century romantic nationalism.” She encourages her students and others to wrestle with the true meanings of the American Revolution. This questioning of what the tea parties — present and past — are all about “is an important part of our political debate.” And so the arguments rage on.

And as we have discussed before and as other websites do on a daily basis, the battleground of history is the use and abuse of it. And indeed the arguments will “rage on” atleast through the November election season.

American Revolution historian Jack Rakove made what I thought was the best observation:

The Tea Act of 1773 that sparked the Boston Tea Party, Rakove says, was born of the crown’s collusion with corporate Britain — the East India Trading Co. So if Tea Partiers are up in arms over the American government being in cahoots with the corporate world — say, over the Obama administration’s handling of the Troubled Assets Relief Program that bailed out many faltering financial institutions — the present-day dismay would have legitimate roots in the ire of yesteryear. “That wouldn’t be implausible,” Rakove says.

That is where the current movement could make some key important historical comparisons.

Henry Adams was a descendant of the iconic Adams family of presidents and statesmen, and while making his journey into the historical profession was more natural than most, he desperately wanted to be a politician but failed. Adams greatly influenced future noted historian Carl Becker. Though the scientific method was radically changing historical methodology, the idea of progress was still not far away for Becker and others as he “had postulated history as the record of progress” for society. But unlike Jackson and Bancroft, this all changed for Becker as he discovered a new kind of “complexity” in history and the evolution of the historical record. The impact was so decisive that he literally went back and rewrote previous works. Adams was one of the first to train his students in the “meticulous critical methods of German scholarship.” American students were encouraged to study abroad and upon returning to America they in turn instructed future students in the German school of scientific inquiry.

Adam’s generation of historians followed the lead of noted German historian Leopold von Ranke, who is considered to be the “pioneer” of the scientific school of historical scholarship. This time period was the turning point in the American historical profession. It is at this time when the idea of “objectivity” comes to the forefront. As noted, Adams was one of the first to train his students in the scientific method, but he still believed in “American Exceptionalism” and that “the average American” was wiser and better off than his European counterpart. Adams saw the study of American history as a “laboratory in which one could study undisturbed the social evolution of democracy.” Though his methods were more objective than any previous generation of American historians could have hoped for, Adams still saw American greatness and progress and that American history was the most worthy of study as it “represented the greatest democratic evolution the world could know.”

Though the idea of American progress was still present in the writings of these new “scientific” historians, there was something very different about their philosophy. The economic interpretation of history as seen in the writing of Karl Marx was making an impact. As Adams himself admitted in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, “he [Adams] should have also been a Marxist,” if it were not for his New England sensibilities and aversions to socialism. But there was something about the notion of history as a constant struggle between classes that appealed to him at one time in his career. Adams was not immune to seeing “phases” in history that centered on economic and social struggles, and he was not alone. Why was this becoming prominent in many academic circles? The advent of the Industrial Age, the growth of enormous cities and along with it the distribution of wealth and the growing gap between rich and poor. A new movement was taking hold in the American historical profession and one that had its roots in the social conditions of the era.

As Robert H. Wiebe noted in his “The Search for Order: 1877-1920″ the late 19th Century was one of great change that left many Americans searching for a sense of normalcy that had been lost in the transformation to a modern industrial society. This led many to a movement that would become known as Progressivism and the Progressive Era – the most important and influential political and social movement of the time and perhaps in all of American history.

It wasn’t just a social and political movement, it was a cultural shift. Just as Bancroft was a child of Victorian American, so too were the scholars of early1900s who were born from the progressive womb. These early Progressives were vital in moving the American historical profession to a truly scientific and professional level. They challenged the status quo and dared to present thesis’s that were controversial.

In 1919 Harry Elmer Barnes published History, its rise and development: a survey of the progress of historical writing from its origins to the present day, and in it he outlined the progress of the American historical profession: “The application of the more critical methods to the field of American history has resulted in works worthy to rank with the best European products and has quite reconstructed the earlier notions of American national development.” Barnes evaluated the evolution of the profession starting with Bancroft and his post-Civil War work to the current Progressives and saw that “the new scholarship had permeated the whole American university world” and was creating students who applied their methods to historical investigation. And just as importantly, the interpretation of American history had “finally been secularized.” The progress that these new historians believed in was not that of Bancroft’s theological and patriotic (American Exceptionalism) discourse, but of a progress in institutions and not men alone.

As the United States became an industrial power and the social injustices of poverty, distribution of wealth, worker’s rights, and women suffrage became important battle cries of Progressives, the historian was at work attempting to explain and interpret the present state of affairs and of historical progress. American scholars once again joined with their European counterparts and determined (echoing Marx) that an economic determination of events seemed to be at play. And they were correct; there had not been any serious inquiry into the economic aspects of historical events. There was a void and it was going to be filled.

The scholars from 1900-1920, especially, noted one historian, were looking for “economic determents” in their quest for an economic “synthesis of society.” They wanted, as did Bancroft, a usable past that for them could help address current social ills. There were studies that looked critically, for the first time in American history, at capitalism and the motivations of corporations and the evils of monopolies. Progress was not just wealth, but poverty. One of the first to look critically at economics was Edwin R.A. Seligman who wrote The Economic Interpretation of History in 1902. Not far behind was Gustavus Myers’ The History of the Great American Fortunes (1907). Algie M. Simmons, a committed socialist, wrote openly about the Social Forces in American History (1911) that first circulated as a pamphlet and addressed social ills as symptoms of economic injustices. There were histories about the “Robber Barons” and “Captains of Industry,” and each time economic synthesis was the goal.

There are two solid candidates for our “best” representation of the era: James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard. Robinson was openly critical of the previous schools of historical investigation and rightly so. To Robinson the work of Bancroft was a “crime” against history. But though Robinson was eloquent and forceful (he was a champion of “value-free” objectivity), the best representative of the time period is Beard.

Beard’s first book, The Industrial Revolution (1901), was essentially an economic interpretation of history and in it he proclaimed that the Industrial Revolution was the “universal driving force” of history, not some vague “exceptionalism” or cultural advancement. But Beard’s most important book is perhaps the most controversial American historical study ever written: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. This work best represents the Progressive sensibility of progress in the American historical profession of the time. The book shocked contemporaries and as historian Ernst Breisach noted, it should not have. All of Beard’s work was an examination of phases and processes in American history and at the core of it were always economic determinants.

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution caused an uproar, but not within Progressive academia. Newspaper editorials howled and the Right was up in arms over the abomination of Beard’s analysis, which, to put it simply, was not about American Exceptionalism and progress, but greed and power. The Founders were simply looking out for their own economic interests first, Beard concluded. He openly challenged Bancroft and his “mystic” reverence for the Founders and the Constitution. He also challenged the “so-called” scientific and objective scholars who had failed to come to his same conclusion.

Beard was, frankly, blazing a trail few dared to burn. As for his idea of “progress,” he was explicit:
The whole theory of the economic interpretation of history rests upon the concept that social progress in general is the result of contending interests in society – some favorable, others opposed to change.

Beard wanted to rescue American History from mythology at best and mysticism at worst. He used strong language such as “economic determinism” and would be accused of being a socialist. Was Beard influenced by Marxist ideology, of course, but as historian Peter Novick attests, Beard outright “rejected” Marxism. Beard bemoaned the interpretation of the Constitutional Convention as a “popular product” and created by impartial and disinterested men. Beard years after publication claimed that he did not go in search for what he found and that when he found the economic motivations behind the Founders it was, “the shock of my life.” Others have since argued that Beard was a Marxist and his goal was to destroy the image of the Constitution as a sacred document and put in its place the concepts of class struggle and Marxist ideology. The Constitutional Convention enhanced the few at the expense of the many and established the ultimate Bourgeois state, according to a Marxist interpretation.

Beard wrote that “the devotion to deductions from principles exemplified in particular cases, which is such a sign of American legal thinking, has the same effect upon correct analysis which the adherence to abstract terms had upon the advancement of learning.” For Beard it was about taking the Founders and the Constitution off the mantle and to consider them as men and not demigods. As modern scholar and American Revolution historian Gordon S. Wood has noted, that though Beard has “been proved wrong on almost every count,” he was “right” in his desire to remove the “mythical” nature and reverence of historical scholarship concerning the Founding that had taken place up to that time.

By 1914 historians were amazed at how far the American historical profession had come in its quest for objectivity and professionalism. The “New Historians” were filled with optimism and compared their craft with that of the great German historians. Jameson had declared at one time the work of American historians as “second class,” but was now sure that “an age of generalization, of synthesis, of history more largely governed and informed by general ideas” was now possible. Though an exaggeration to be sure, Jameson had reason for optimism for as we have seen the development of the American historical profession had been transformed by the early 1900s into something resembling modern historical scholarship.

There is little doubt that Bancroft would have been appalled of Beard’s economic interpretation of the American Constitution. Beard was equally critical of former generations of historians who failed, in his mind, to ask the tough questions. Both men had clear ideas of progress and the historical profession and how best to analyze and present historical data. For Bancroft the founding of the nation and the successful conclusion of the Civil War was proof that God’s will had been achieved and that America had faced its last great test. The country had finally fulfilled its promise of freedom and had become an empire of liberty. The values of the Founders had been justified and validated. There was in his eyes no need for a continuation of progress and as already noted, he even hinted at the end of history (progress) for America.

By 1920 the Progressives had experienced what they felt was the singular great challenge for America in the form of economic injustice and political corruption. Industrialization had created a “search for order” and an economic interpretation of history fit the needs of the Progressives just as Bancroft’s theological patriotism did Victorian America. The focus on progress of American institutions and government aided the Progressive causes as they sought to improve working conditions, poverty, immigration and suffrage rights. The economic interpretation of Beard made more sense to this generation than did the writing of proceeding generations. As we have seen, each new generation from 1870 to 1920 was flawed and some more deeply than others, but all sought what they believed was a usable past that conformed to the needs of their generation to strengthen their values and assumptions. By 1920 the scientific revolution ensured that the American historical profession would use methodological approaches to eventually ensure as much historical accuracy and objectivity as possible.

Peter Novick wrote in the Introduction of his book, The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, that he hoped to look effectively into what historians “thought” they were doing and what they thought they “ought” to be doing as they created history. He wished to encourage historians to a “greater self-consciousness about the nature” of their work. Novick succeed brilliantly and in this short presentation, I think, we have examined how the role of “progress” in historical interpretation and understanding, at the very least, informed if not encouraged the advancement of the historical profession.

Fiske believed in a theory of evolution that could be applied to American civilization (and the world for that matter) but his views and ideas were deemed “unconventional” and never reached the level of popularity that Bancroft had enjoyed. Since his days at Harvard (1860) Fiske was also a follower of Herbert Spence and Social Darwinism. In his book The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of his Origin, Fiske devoted a whole chapter to “Mr. Darwin.” His views on evolution dominated his writing at times and probably helped to produce his most original history, The Discovery of America (1892) where in it he discussed the “evolution of primitive society” in relation to Native Americans and not just Europeans. Fiske was one of the first historians to stress the important role that archaeology can play in the study of early American history.

Fiske never reached the level of scientific methodology that would place him in the professional level of historian as he too often relied on secondary sources and was never a great editor. Fiske also didn’t fit into Bancroft’s school of thought, though he held strong religious beliefs; however, he was never comfortable with Bancroft’s historical theology. As one modern historian noted, “To the end of his days Fiske was still trying to harmonize his religious beliefs and ideals with the latest doctrines of science.”

America’s first Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884 and its first important professional publication, the “American Historical Review,” appeared in1895. The writing of American history was changing hands from pseudo-professionals to what we would call modern scholars. The Bancroft’s and Fiske’s, though stylists and scholars in their own right, never reached the level of inquiry that the scientific and professional class did.

David Hackett Fischer in his “Historical Fallacies” wrote that each generation would have to assimilate nearly twice as many books as the proceeding generation. By the turn of the century something was happening within the American historical profession. First, it was becoming a true “profession” where scholars went to the University to study history; second, its membership was increasing exponentially and; third, the amount of scholarship produced alone demanded a change in methodology.

Prior to the 1880s the evolution of archives and collections was uneven and dispersed, and the writing of American History rested in the hands of the few. However, by the early 1900s everything had changed. In 1903, the first “Writings on American History” appeared with its bibliographical listing of published works organized into categories. The editors wrote a short introduction and in it they stated:

The writings on American history are now so numerous, so many valuable articles appear in unexpected places, so many papers are published in the proceedings of historical societies under such circumstances that they may not normally attract the attention of even the watchful specialist, so many in fact are the difficulties in the way of keeping abreast of American historical bibliography, that a list of this kind would seem to have its evident usefulness. Only by some such means as this can we avoid, as the years go by, the most baffling confusion or prevent the practical disappearance of even some important contributions.

The eventual founder and editor of the American Historical Review John Franklin Jameson noted in 1891 the growing differences between old and new scholarship in the historical profession. Before the 1890s historians worked in “isolation” and often with limited materials. He summarized his findings noting two important changes:

In the domain of American history, the change has taken effect in two directions or modes. In the first place, we have become more critical and discriminating, have learned more nearly to look upon the course of American history with an impartial eye, from the standpoint of an outsider. In the second place, there has ensued a broadening of the field of investigation and work, that its scope may correspond to the scheme of things in America, to the configuration of actual affairs.

The dawn of professionalism had been reached. This “first generation” of professional scholars evolved from 1870 to 1910, according to one historian. The idea of “progress” is still present in the works of historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and his “Frontier Hypothesis,” but the idea of progress and American civilization is less important to these new “objective” scholars who wanted scientific analysis of historical data. Jackson was closer in philosophy to Bancroft than to the new movement though he would cross over from time to time as exemplified in his 1891 essay “The Significance of History.” Therefore, probably the best representative of the “scientific” school of history was Henry Adams.

Part III coming tomorrow

[Footnotes removed so as not to allow someone to use this paper.]