Carl Degler, a historian and a Pulitzer price winner once accused his collegues of dereliction of duty. According to Degler, these people had abandoned the study of the nation. In the article, “A New Americanism: Why a Nation needs a National History” by Jill Lepore, the author argues that historians have abandoned writing about America’s national history, a phenomenon that has detrimental consequences.
First, when scholars stop writing about a nation’s history, nationalism does not die, instead, it eats on liberalism. According to Lepore, lack of a nation’s history leads to the creation of nationalists. To illustrate, the current American history does not seek to answer “significant questions,” which gives rise to the likes who want to make America ‘great again’ and call immigrants ‘animals.’
It is understandable why historians in the second half of the 20th century shied away from writing about the nation’s history. America had just been drawn into the deadliest bloodbaths in the history of human kind, thanks to a rising wave of nationalism that had taken over Europe and influenced many in the United States.
Nationalism was no longer something admirable; it was associated with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, individuals that embodied evil in the American eyes. Lepore writes, “If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Nationalism had changed beginning in the 1910s, Lepore mentions that the more illiberal nationalism increased in the 1930s, more liberals concluded that “liberal nationalism” was something impossible.
Whenever I study about American history, I learn about the atrocities and prejudices that were done in the name of white supremacy. One purpose of history is to help the modern man learn from past mistake. However, how will the learning happen when people, like ostriches, hide their head in sand by avoiding to write about a nation’s history in the fear of nationalism.
According to Lepore on Degler’s comment, “He issued a warning: “If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.” Degler’s prophecy is coming to fruition as anyone in America will have noticed the growing amount nationalism. Maybe, liberalism is already in its death bed.
I had never noticed that few historians were writing about a unified American history. As a history student, the focus of my education is on American history, which seem to be well documented by American scholars. However, one of the books that I know about that writes about the nation’s history is “America: Empire of Liberty” by David Reynolds.
Reynolds is a British historian, which makes me realize that Lepore might be onto something. What’s more, most of my knowledge about American history in an unbiased way comes from college, a privilege that I did not enjoy before. Lepore explains this phenomenon by asserting that in the second half of the 20th century, women and people of color began writing about history.
Racial history was written from the perspective of minorities, and the history of women was written by women, therefore, most of the new American historical scholarship was not about America, but was rather in America. In addition, during the 1980s when Degler was expressing his concerns, most American historians were advocating for a historical cosmopolitanism, encouraging people to write about global history instead of the Nation’s history. Michael Walzer asserts, “The tribes have returned, they had never left, they only become harder for historians to see, because they weren’t really looking anymore.” Walzer is only sharing in Degler’s concern.
The book by David Reynolds, “America: Empire of Liberty” chose to use the term America instead of calling it a nation. The common understanding of what an empire is that an empires seeks to deepen its influence over territories beyond its sovereignty, and from this understanding, America’s influence can be realized worldwide, which qualifies it as an empire.
In the 19th century, America was divided ideologically between the north and the south. Something that both Reynolds and Lepore mention. According to Lepore, there was a contrast between nothern nationalism and southern nationalism. Michigan congressman mentioned in the year 1850 that American needed to cultivate a national instead of sectional patriotism, this was to criticize the division that was manifest in America then.
Moreover, distinctions between northern and southern nationalism are criticized for terming one kind of nationalism as bad. America is still divided along these lines and it is important to study past history so that we do not draw ourselves into another civil war.
I had never noticed that American historians were shying away from writing about the nation’s history in fear of nationalism. However, I have to acknowledge that most Americans have inconclusive knowledge about their nation’s history. I believe that the work of history is not to indoctrinate but to teach. Writing about the nation’s history might be ugly, but it is worse not to write about it at all. America is the empire of liberty, and avoiding to write about how it came to earn that title will only dilute what America stands for. What’s more, studying American history gives the people a unified understanding and would eliminate most of its social problems. Therefore, I stand with Degler when he mentions that not writing about the nation’s history will kill liberalism.
References
Lepore (2019) The New Americanism; Why a Nation Needs a National Story. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2019-02-05/new-americanism-nationalism-jill-lepore
Zac Viper 