Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 18:46:06 -0400
From: H-DIPLO <hdiplo@YorkU.CA>
Subject: The AHA and the Historical Society [Schroeder]

From: Paul Schroeder <pschroed@uiuc.edu>

The exchange between Marc Trachtenberg and James Banner concerns a
serious subject that ought to interest historians in general, especially
so-called diplomatic historians, and it has so far been conducted
especially by Prof. Trachtenberg in a restrained, conciliatory fashion. I
hope I do not spoil that, and will try to remain within the bounds of
civilized, relevant debate, but I believe that a much stronger reply to
Prof. Banner is needed. It is briefly this: that both of Prof. Banner's
rejoinders are characterized by, and rest upon, gratuitous imputations of
motives; unwarranted assertions of fact; serious conceptual confusion;
and ill-founded aspersions upon the loyalty and professional
responsibility of those who choose either to leave the AHA or join the
Historical Society. At the same time, important reasons for many members
to be dissatisfied with the AHA and to desire a different professional
organization at least to supplement and influence it are being ignored.
I think Banner's characterization of the composition and motives
of those joining the Historical Society can fairly be summarized as
follows (most of the following is either direct quotation or close
paraphrase of his language): they are old white males aggrieved at thirty
years of revolutionary change and advance in the practice of history
because this change has cost them their previous "monopoly position of
studies of politics and institutions, of men and warfare," which monopoly
constituted an "appalling restraint of trade." Their "distaste for any
uncontrolled marketplace, even that of ideas" and their loss of dominant
position in the AHA as a democratically run organization now prompts them
not to stay and fight for influence, but to pick up their marbles and go
elsewhere, ignoring the harm they do thereby to the historical profession,
the cause of history, their students, their particular disciplines, and
themselves.

I do not know the motives of others who like me have joined the
Historical Society, and unlike Prof. Banner prefer not to guess. I do know
that except for being old, white, and male I do not recognize myself at
all in his description. I do not feel personally aggrieved or threatened
by current historical trends in the slightest. I have enjoyed and now
enjoy far more honor in my own small scholarly world than I ever dreamed
possible or that I honestly think I deserve. Nor do I have anything
intrinsically against the AHA as a very valuable professional organization
uniting and serving all historians. I have been a member for more than
forty years and served it in various capacities. I do not think that by
and large the current trends in historiography are either bad in
themselves or threatening to other fields in history (though my overall
assessment of their contributions and their cost-benefit ratio differs
considerably from Banner's). Though I share Trachtenberg's anguish over
the plight of graduate students trained in traditional fields trying to
find jobs (various postings show that the effects of a certain reverse
discrimination here are real), this is not the principal reason for my
concern. As for the struggles for control of the AHA, its offices, its
publications, its annual convention program, etc., my personal attitude is
strictly Rhett Butler's: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." My
thoughts and feelings are per se unimportant, of course. Yet they might
serve to convince a critic of "disheveled anecdotalism" like Prof. Banner
to be a bit more cautious in imputing motives and to consider the
possibility that quite other grounds may be involved.
What is important and can be empirically judged is his picture of
the last thirty years in historiography. According to him, it represents a
marvelous, unique advance in new approaches, discoveries, and the
exploration of neglected subject matter, all serving to overthrow an
entrenched orthodoxy, against which many are reacting in frightened pique.
Leave aside for a moment the appraisal of these marvelous new advances. I
taught historiography and theory of history for many years, and regard
this picture as, to use another Banner phrase, "exceedingly naive or
disingenuous." I cannot imagine what he means by a time thirty years ago
when a male-dominated political, constitutional-institutional,
military-diplomatic history ruled the historiographical world. This is
nonsense. The history of historiography ever since the 1920's, in this
country and elsewhere (with the sole important exception of Germany, for
particular obvious reasons, and even there there were challenges) has been
one long succession of new waves challenging the reputed old orthodoxy of
politics, diplomacy, and warfere, each new wave and trend claiming to
regenerate history by turning it away from these superficial concerns to
the deep structures of real life--society, economics, psychology, culture,
everyday life, you name it. The list is too long even to name
here--Annales history, the new social history, the new economic history,
econometrics, psychohistory, sociobiology, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, x
varieties of marxist and Marxisant history, the new cultural history, the
new anthropological history, demographic history, etc. almost ad
infinitum. Read a standard text like Ernst Breisach's if you need
evidence. My point is not that there is nothing new about the trends of
the last thirty years or so; obviously there is, especially in gender and
women's history. It is that this picture of new forces breaking down the
entrenched resistance of the old is faintly ridiculous. Every new wave,
current and old, essentially runs at an open door, especially in a
historical profession so vast, diverse, and open as that of the United
States, and claims to have broken it down.
And what has happened to the old traditional fields of political,
constitutional, diplomatic, and military history in this period of
unremitting change, challenge, and attack? I can answer with some
authority for my own field, European and world international history. The
answer is that of the French aristocrat, asked in 1815 what he did in the
Revolution: "I survived." In my more than forty years of experience, this
field has always been under a cloud of suspicion, disdain, and attack as
old-fashioned, simplist, superficial, easy and undemanding, statist,
elitist, outworn, and even dehumanizing. Yet it has not merely survived,
but changed, adapted, improved, learned from the incessant attacks and
criticism, ignorant and one-sided though much of them were, and continued
to demonstrate its importance and viability as part, though only part, of
the historiographical terrain. As for the other traditional fields named,
my impression is exactly the same. It is particularly absurd, for example,
to claim that military history ever ruled the coop, alone or in
combination with other male-dominated fields. When I came in, military
history was far more despised than diplomatic; it took a fight at the
University of Illinois to get military history into the History Department
rather than ROTC. Today the new military history (which is really new and
different) has transformed the field, and only an ignoramus would doubt
the enormous importance of the history of warfare for the history of
politics, economics, society, state-formation, culture, and a host of
other things, including women and gender.
If this is true, why complain? Why form a new Historical Society
and threaten to leave the AHA? Precisely because of the attitude expressed
by Banner in his defense of the current trends in the AHA, that a
"majority of historians has decided that for the time being at least we
know enough of traditional subjects and must learn more. . . about
subjects previously ignored." This remarkable sentiment raises a host of
questions, and demonstrates the conceptual confusion I earlier alleged.
First of all, who precisely is the "we" who have decided that "we" know
all we need to in these fields for the present? Evidently, professional
historians as a group, trying to decide by some sort of collective wisdom
in what direction historiography ought to be going for the next decade or
two. And what do these professional historians by and large as a group,
especially those leading the current trends in a highly organized,
politicized way, actually know of the fields about which we allegedly know
enough already? Not very much, and what they know is dubious and out of
date. And for whom do es this group decide how much attention (or in this
case, neglect) is salutary? Merely for themselves as individuals? No, for
the entire historical profession, for history departments everywhere, and
thereby directly for undergraduate and graduate students now and in the
future, and indirectly for the broad public and community that we would
like to have consume and learn from the history we produce, and whose
almost total ignorance of these fields is legendary.
There are at least three fundamental sources of conceptual
confusion here. The first is that historiography, its practice and future
direction, belongs to us as professional historians to decide and direct
through our professional organization, and that in this way we can
strongly influence, if not control, what history teaches and what the
broad public will learn from it. Prof. Banner is visibly appalled by the
supposed elitism of traditionally-oriented white male scholars in the
profession. I am not appalled but amused by the elitism of this
assumption. There may be some subjects (say, astrophysics) which so to
speak belong to their professional practitioners, whose direction can be
more or less controlled by the professional societies. History is not one
of them. History does not belong to us. It belongs to everyone. If we
think that the broad public, including students, educated lay persons, and
decision-makers in various walks of life does not need serious attention
to traditional kinds of history, or is not interested in them, and that
this broad public represented in state legislatures will continue
cheerfully to support a brand of history teaching and scholarship that
neglects them, then we need to think again, and check book catalogs and
best seller lists while doing so. If we do not meet these needs, others
will, and are doing so, and we will be the losers. One objection to
current trends in the AHA is that in neglecting and abandoning old fields
in order to concentrate on new, supposedly exciting ones, it is engaged in
a deliberate self-marginalization of history in the public sphere
The second source is the belief that history advances by such a
process of at least temporary neglect and suspension of old lines of
inquiry to concentrate on the new. It does not. That is true of many
disciplines, especially hard sciences, but not history. History advances,
true, by constantly discovering and developing new subjects formerly
unsuspected, underworked, or considered not to belong in history--this is
the great advance represented by gender and women's history, like many
before them--but not by abandoning or neglecting older fields in their
favor. History advances instead by integrating newer subjects with the
old and developing them both. This was the great defect of the Annales
approach, for all its contributions, that it relegated some kinds of
history to an inferior category and let them go. French historiography is
now having to make good the damage.
But the most immediate and important error from the practical
standpoint is the assumption that leaving whole major fields of history
fallow for a decade or two in order to concentrate on new ones is without
significant costs--that all we need to do in a generation or so, after the
old die-hards are gone, is to take them up again where we left off. This
is totally wrong. To sustain a field, one needs a critical mass of
scholars working in it, producing graduate students ho carry it on.
Otherwise for practical purposes it dies, and takes much time and cost to
revive. Meantime the whole historiography is gravely distorted. The
backwardness of Germany in social history in the early 20th century,
persistent to some degree even till today, illustrates this. The
difficulty of placing students trained in traditional fields, and the
contortions they must go through to conceal their actual specialties, is
just one aspect of this general problem and danger.
It is the one, moreover, which bothers me personally. So long as I
felt that there existed in this country a sufficient critical mass of
historians and scholarly interest to keep the field of European and world
international history, especially that before the 20th century, alive and
kicking, I never worried about its relative place in the historical
pecking order. Who cares? But that this critical mass should continue to
exist, I care very much--and though I am no Cassandra or congenital
pessimist, I cannot any longer be sure that that is the case. Let me give
some evidence--anecdotal, to be sure, but anecdotal evidence is evidence,
and worth paying attention to especially when it comes from knowledgeable
observers.
Two quotations from leading political scientists and international
relations experts who deal regularly with history and historians: Stephen
Krasner of Stanford--"Let's face it--diplomatic history is down the
toilet." Robert Jervis of Columbia (in reference to European diplomatic
historians): "Alas, they are a dying breed." I have had at least three
inquiries in recent years, mainly from international relations programs,
about good young European diplomatic historians who could be brought in,
and had great difficulty coming up with a recommendation. There are still
outstanding American historians in this field--but mostly, I think, my
generation. There may be as many leading practitioners of this craft now
in Canada as there are in the United States--certainly more in Great
Britain and Germany. There are major universities in this country with
flourishing programs and institutes in international relations, but no
international historian in the history department. I can find almost no
sessions or papers dealing with this subject in recent AHA convention
programs; many at any German Historikertag; literally dozens at any
American Political Science Association convention.
In short, I see a major, vital field of historical inquiry, the
very one on which history cut its sicentific teeth, so to speak, in
danger; I see this as not a universal trend but solely a particular,
provincial American one; I see this as connected with, though not solely
caused by, the trends Prof. Banner defends; and I know that the AHA as an
institution simply does not care. An illustration: for a number of years
until recently, the AHA in soliciting membership renewals and dues asked
members to fill out a questionnaire listing their fields. There were 65,
arranged geographically, chronologically, and by subject matter. It was in
general a comprehensive list; among 18 subject preferences listed in US
history was US diplomatic/international. There was no listing at all for
European/world international history. If that was your specialty, you had
to write it out under "Other." Several times in renewing my membership I
included a letter protesting against this absurd omission, and received no
reply. It was only when I threatened to cancel my membership that I
received a letter with the usual pleas that the AHA wanted everyone to
feel welcome, and that the new registration system would take care of my
complaint. It has. International history is now one of 234 preferences.
This particular complaint has disappeared; the prevailing attitude behind
it has not.
What is happening is not that European international history is
disappearing from the American scholarly world--far from it. It is that it
is gradually being taken over, done, and dominated by political scientists
and IR theorists. I have nothing against them; many of them do their tasks
very well, and make important contributions also to international history.
But they do not do this history as historians can and should do it, and
that the American historical profession should allow this part of its
birthright so to slip away seems to me genuinely wrong, even tragic.
Prof. Banner will reply (has replied) that if this is so,
international historians and others should stay in the AHA, organize with
others, and fight for influence, and at least hints that if we do not, we
are whiners, quitters, sore losers, and disloyal to our common
organization and home. There are several replies to this. The first is
commonsensical. If one has tried this argument out as I have, in a setting
where it could be expected to have some effect (my own former department)
and learned that it had the same chances of success as a defense of the
Clinton presidency at a Republican national convention, because the real
issue was not rational choice but politics, one may be deterred from such
further futile efforts and look for other avenues. Another reason is
rational cost-benefit utility analyis: where can one do the most good and
make the most gains with limited resources? If my goal is to help keep
international history going as a general enterprise, given the current
surprisingly lively demand in certain quarters for what I can offer, I
have decided on the basis of rational choice and market principles to do
so primarily in political science circles here and historical ones abroad.
I have no doubt that others may make a similar calculation. Finally, in re
loyalty to the AHA, while I have always supported it with my dues and with
some service, and fully recognize the importance and value of an overall
organization to represent and defend the scholarly and professional
interests of historians in the public sphere, my fundamental loyalty is to
History writ large and to its ideals as I understand them. If one finds an
organization, however useful in principle, no longer really representing
and defending those ideals (here is where a good deal could be said on
Prof. Banner's remarks about ideology and postmodernism, but not now),
then the more basic loyalty has to prevail.
Thanks for your patience.

Paul Schroeder