From The New York Review of Books:
What was America? The question is nearly as old as the republic itself. In 1789, the year George Washington began his first term, the South Carolina doctor and statesman David Ramsay set out to understand the new nation by looking to its short past. America’s histories at the time were local, stories of states or scattered tales of colonial lore; nations were tied together by bloodline, or religion, or ancestral soil. “The Americans knew but little of one another,” Ramsay wrote, delivering an accounting that both presented his contemporaries as a single people, despite their differences, and tossed aside the assumptions of what would be needed to hold them together. “When the war began, the Americans were a mass of husbandmen, merchants, mechanics and fishermen; but the necessities of the country gave a spring to the active powers of the inhabitants, and set them on thinking, speaking and acting in a line far beyond that to which they had been accustomed.” The Constitution had just been ratified at the time of Ramsay’s writing, the first system of national government submitted to its people for approval. “A vast expansion of the human mind speedily followed,” he wrote. It hashed out the nation as a set of principles. America was an idea. America was an argument.
The question has animated American history ever since. “For the last half century,” the historian and essayist Jill Lepore told an interviewer in 2011, academic historians have been trying “to write an integrated history of the United States, a history both black and white, a history that weaves together political history and social history, the history of presidents and the history of slavery.”
. . . .
Lepore has surmised . . . that too much historical writing—and perhaps too much nonfiction in general—proceeds without many of the qualities that readers recognize as essential to experience: “humor, and art, and passion, and love, and tenderness, and sex… and fear, and terror, and the sublime, and cruelty.” Things that she calls “organic to the period, and yet lost to us.” Lepore’s training as a historian, she’s said, tried to teach her that these things did not contain worthy explanations. In graduate school her interest in them “looked like a liability, and I took note.”
. . . .
For Lepore, history is essentially a writing problem: how we know what we know (or think we do), how different forms and genres transmit different kinds of signals, what it might mean to encounter a gap between the evidence and the truth. Her work has confronted the tension between what a reader needs to know for a story to work and the limits of what can be known, and what makes the difference between a person and a character. When she wrote a historical novel, set in colonial Boston and employing the dialect of the time, her co-author called it “a different way of knowing and telling the past.” After publication, they began receiving etymology queries from the Oxford English Dictionary.
Lepore has called history “the anti-novel” and “the novel’s twin.” Both history and the novel took the forms we recognize today over roughly the same period, emerging as ways of making sense of the world during a time of great changes, and over the past two centuries or so they have followed parallel paths. Between them was often the boundary of the self: history happens out in the world, growing out of inquiries into its documents, registers, and other records, while novels present an experience of it.
Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books
When she said “post-fact” America I thought she was referring to the making up of new history that has been going on of late.
About 6 years ago I was attending a college history class (I was 39 at the time) and the professor asked what started the civil war… and the very predictable “States Rights” came out of the mouth of almost everyone in the class. Which is funny since the vast majority of them wouldn’t know what states rights were if they hit them upside the head.
He said it was very simple. Start removing elements until you are left with the one that if it wasn’t there, the war wouldn’t have happened. There is only one element that qualifies, slavery. Oh, how the students howled. And this is in Idaho, a supposed conservative state. I can only imagine in other places the universities would have rewarded their idiot students with a degree.
Many of those today cannot believe that the times were ever different from the here and now where they’ve grown up.
Heck, they can’t even imagine how others live and are treated elsewhere in the world.
…or across the river.
Gays and Minorities are oppressed in America because they aren’t actively loved and promoted by all!
Meanwhile in Iran… Throw them off the tallest crane!
This is something that I’m wrestling with right now, so thanks for posting this! Gave me some additional insights. Having written several historical novels – the last one based around the wife of Robert Burns, so it had to be accurate – I realised that as a novelist you find yourself asking ‘what did that feel like?’ all the time which isn’t something you do as a social historian. Besides, it’s not always a question you can answer because you can’t un-know what you know! But for the past year or so, I’ve been working on a book about a murder in my own family. So it’s a factual account. But I’m a novelist. And besides, the more I’ve found out, the more personal and emotional the story has become. It’s still not a novel but I’m not sure what it is. I’ve been trying to get at something of the truth about the lives of people who were poor, neglected, exploited and generally despised – the migrant Irish in Victorian Britain. I feel as if I’m writing neither fact nor fiction but something in between.
True crime is a category all its own, with a looong and proud tradition. Think Dumas, Pere.
Don’t fret, just let the story carry you along.
For those who may want to know more about Jill Lepore’s written work: These Truths. That will take you to one of her works. From there you may find others. Warning! Pricey.
There is:
– The Actual Event
– Eyewitness Account
– Reportage
– History
– Legend
– Myth
This is not a linear process. You can have The Actual Event and leap straight to Myth, with History trying to unravel the Myth.
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
— The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
There is also a class of false History that I don’t have the technical terms for, where they literally manufacture a false History. There is also what I think are called “Ghost books” that never existed, but multiple people will refer to as a reference making up quotes from the nonexistent book to support their false history.
I’m still trying to find the technical terms for these types of books. I think I have to look into the history of history for that. HA!