Making History
The aim with this newsletter is to show history in the making: experimental, misguided, conspiratorial, often wrong, but also exciting, serendipitous, intuitive, perhaps sometimes right — combining the explanatory ambition of the political economist, the sense for detail of the novelist, and the obsessive drive to track down every last clue of the detective.
Walk into any university history seminar in the past few decades and you’d hear about the need to “problematize the archive.” But even as historians “read against the grain,” extracting from dusty old documents not what their authors (typically the powerful) intended but what they couldn’t help but disclose, we tend to tell stories that sound much the same as before. Mastery remains the dominant tone, sustained today not by insisting on the final truth of every account but through stylistic finesse. This thing happened; also this thing; also this thing — one damn thing after another, but by a sleight of hand I connect them together, and the more arcane my footnotes, the more power I have to suggest they cohere, even if I don’t quite say how.
True, you can admit ignorance as a historian; there is always that helpful locution, “further research remains to be done.” But that phrase essentially serves as an assertion of authority: I am such a master of the scholarship that I know what’s missing. More advanced practitioners of contemporary historical style may go further and continually remind readers of what research will always remain to be done, because so little has been saved. The one thing a historian can’t admit — in writing at least — is that you haven’t yet done even the most basic research, that you’re still just barely figuring things out. This is why historians, unlike other social scientists (the field has feet in both social science and the humanities), essentially never share early drafts of their work online. In a field defined not by datasets or experiments, regressions or rational arguments, the coins of the realm remain “coverage,” i.e. reading as much as possible, and exhaustive accuracy. If you don’t fulfill those desiderata, you debase the profession, or at least yourself.
By bringing together a group of likeminded writers and researchers, from both inside and outside the academy, this newsletter hopes to begin breaking down some of these taboos. In the process, we will also work through many of our shared concerns, whether how to make sense of the development of the New Deal, neoliberalism, and whatever it is we’re living through today, or how to show ideas at work amid the messiness and mundanity of everyday life.
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In the Stanford Archives there is a plaster model for a large frieze, titled “The Progress of American Civilization,” that once wrapped around a gigantic arch at the entrance to campus. This particular panel shows Jane Stanford (center) and Leland Stanford (center right) leading a Central Pacific locomotive across the California mountains. According to one contemporary account:
“At the right end of the engraving we see Titans holding up the mountains, which the railway is entering. The mounted group, balancing the figures of Cortez and Pizarro at the other end, represents Leland Stanford and his wife, marking out the path for the railway. This is a symbolical use of an actual incident in Mr. Stanford’s life. When he was told that a railway over the southern mountains was impracticable, he rode over the route on horseback, accompanied by his wife, and then told his engineers that where they had gone the railway must follow. The sculptor shows the workmen cleaving the rocks before them, and the locomotive following them. The Genius of Engineering, with surveying instruments, directs the work which marks the last step in the progress of civilization … The general outline of [the story] was suggested by Mrs. Stanford.” “Memorial Frieze and Arch, Stanford University,” The Monumental News, 13 (11), November 1901.
The arch and full-size frieze were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
