Doing Recent History

On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back

Claire Potter, Renee Romano

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780820343020, 9780820334677
• eBook ISBN: 9780820343716
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

Recent history—the very phrase seems like an oxymoron. Yet historians have been writing accounts of the recent past since printed history acquired a modern audience, and in the last several years interest in recent topics has grown exponentially. With subjects as diverse as Walmart and disco, and personalities as disparate as Chavez and Schlafly, books about the history of our own time have become arguably the most exciting and talked-about part of the discipline.

Despite this rich tradition and growing popularity, historians have engaged in little discussion about the specific methodological, political, and ethical issues related to writing about the recent past. The twelve essays in this collection explore the challenges of writing histories of recent events where visibility is inherently imperfect, hindsight and perspective are lacking, and historiography is underdeveloped.

Those who write about events that have taken place since 1970 encounter exciting challenges that are both familiar and foreign to scholars of a more distant past, including suspicions that their research is not historical enough, negotiation with living witnesses who have a very strong stake in their own representation, and the task of working with new electronic sources. Contributors to this collection consider a wide range of these challenges. They question how sources like television and video games can be better utilized in historical research, explore the role and regulation of doing oral histories, consider the ethics of writing about living subjects, discuss how historians can best navigate questions of privacy and copyright law, and imagine the possibilities that new technologies offer for creating transnational and translingual research opportunities. Doing Recent History offers guidance and insight to any researcher considering tackling the not-so-distant past.

PART ONE
Framing the Issues

Not Dead Yet
My Identity Crisis as a Historian of the Recent Past

RENEE C. ROMANO

A COLLEAGUE RECENTLY STOPPED BY my office to express his concerns about a research project on racial politics in the late 1980s and 1990s that one of my students had proposed for his approval. The proposed research, my colleague feared, was not properly historical. How could this student write a strong history paper without more distance from the events she was writing about? he asked. Would there be any historiography that the student could consult to guide her research? Wouldn’t the project become more of a politically driven reflection on recent events than a historical analysis?

While I gathered my thoughts to respond, I couldn’t help but remember the many times I had faced similar questions about my own research. My first project, which began as a dissertation and became a book, was a history of black-white interracial marriage in the United States. The book opened in the 1940s and ended about a day before the manuscript went to page proofs in 2003. My current research jumps even more firmly into contemporary history, focusing on the prosecution of a series of civil rights–era crimes that didn’t begin in earnest until 1994, trials that are ongoing and that may continue for some time. As a result, I have often heard concerns that my work might not be properly historical. Similar to my colleague, a few of my graduate school professors questioned whether my dissertation was really a legitimate topic, given the very limited historiography on the subject of interracial marriage available at the time. Over the years, I’ve heard more casual remarks that my work might be better understood as political science or sociology than as history; indeed, I was surprised to find my history of interracial marriage catalogued by bookstores as belonging in the sociology section, a move no doubt related both to the period and the subject matter. But having double-majored in political science in college and having at least a sense of what sociological studies look like, I knew that I was writing history. I remained confident that I was, in fact, a historian, albeit one who was writing about quite recent events.

But my colleague’s inquiry about this undergraduate paper still gave me pause. Are those of us who study the very recent past always engaged in the act of writing history? Am I really a historian? Trying to answer those questions has forced me to think more deeply than I ever have before about what exactly makes a study historical, about, in short, the methodology of the discipline of history.¹ Reflecting on this exchange with a colleague, I realized that my own identity crisis stemmed from four specific methodological or practical challenges that many historians of the recent past must grapple with and view as productive, if vexing, aspects of our craft. Despite the fact that I have already completed one book of this kind, I continue to worry that I lack access to the kinds of sources that have typically been deemed “most legitimate” by the profession, especially the archival sources that are the foundation of our work. Then there is the problem that few other historians have written about the events I research; the secondary literature on my topics is quite limited. I also have concerns about my inability to construct a historical narrative with any sense of finality, because the events I research are still ongoing and their effects are not yet clear. Finally, I wonder whether I have sufficient distance from the events that I write about—both politically and temporally—to offer meaningful interpretations of my evidence.

To help me navigate this identity crisis, I have turned not to a psychologist but to people who have thought deeply about the field of history and the nature of historical thinking: theorists and philosophers of history. What might those who have written about the nature of historical inquiry have to say about the place of studies of the recent past within the discipline that is constituted and described as history? And how might theoretical writings on history help me think through and about the specific challenges related to researching and writing contemporary history?

What I found is that most of those who write philosophies of history or methodological guidebooks have not spent much time considering what it might mean to write the history of the very recent past. Indeed, much of the theoretical and methodological literature defines history in such a way as to entirely exclude those who study more contemporary events. But I also found that the challenges I have encountered in doing recent history offer an excellent vantage point into the larger methodological and epistemological questions that philosophers and theorists of history have long grappled with. Those of us who are on the boundaries of the discipline, who are trying to forge a way for historians to engage with the recent past without losing our identity or credibility as historians, might have a useful perspective from which to consider the nature and methods of historical thinking and writing more generally.

This essay begins with a survey of when and how key thinkers and writers about the nature of history as a discipline have discussed the study of the recent past.² It then explores what this body of work—with its focus on historical method and form, the nature of historical thinking, and the problems of bias and objectivity—might offer us. While the theoretical literature on the discipline may not specifically address the issues attendant to recent history, it does offer ideas and insights that may prove helpful to those trying to find answers to my problems related to sources, historiography, narrative, and perspective. And while all of these challenges might be considered liabilities, I believe that, in many ways, they also present opportunities for scholars who are serious about that seemingly paradoxical project of writing a history of our own times.

But Is It History? Defining and Disciplining a Field

The idea of history is premised on the belief that there is a break between the present and the past, and that the past is a realm distinct from the present. In her 2008 presidential address to the American Historical Association, Gabrielle Spiegel noted that modern historical writing (here she is differentiating nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians from the ancients) stems from the concept of a “decisive differentiation between the present and past.” The “basic principle” of modern historiography, Spiegel claims, is based on “the disappearance of the past from the present, its movement from visibility to invisibility.”³

While philosophers and theorists of history differ on many issues related to E. H. Carr’s seminal 1961 question, “What is History?,” they readily agree that history is a study and a recovery of this “invisible” past.⁴ In-deed, that definition is so basic as to be almost axiomatic. What is history if not the study of a past that we can distinguish from our present? As one of these works proclaims, “Everyone knows, of course, what history was and is: quite simply, the study of the past.... While other subjects like philosophy, physics, or geography, may include some consideration of the past..., history is differentiated by its nature of having the past as its exclusive subject-matter.”⁵ Historians, like all other scholars, might comment on contemporary events as public intellectuals, but we tend to agree that the past—and only the past—is the proper subject for our scholarship.

Although the works I consulted do not offer any precise definition of when a past suitable for historical study begins (thirty minutes ago? thirty hours ago? thirty years ago?), their rhetoric provides some not-so-subtle clues. Spiegel highlights an invisible past that has disappeared from the present, suggesting that the past worthy of study is the absent past. The language of absence—and of that ultimate absence, death—pervades descriptions of the suitably historical past and of the historian’s task in evoking it. Historians, most of these works suggest, seek to bring back to life a past that is dead, to make visible and legible a past that has passed on into invisibility. Thus Spiegel, paraphrasing Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History, suggests that the practice of history requires opening a “dead corpse” to investigation; discourse about the past is, as de Certeau asserts, “discourse about the dead.” Michael Oakeshott notes that historians turn to the past that has survived in objects and artifacts to attain their real goal: access to the past that has not survived. And both John Tosh and Peter Charles Hoffer task the historian with bringing a past that has not survived back to life. As Tosh writes in The Pursuit of History, historians must direct their imaginative powers to “bringing the past back to life—or resurrecting it,” while Hoffer asserts, “Historians bring to life what is dead.”⁶ Historians, it seems, are part scholars and part saviors.

What, then, are those of us who study the recent past doing when we turn our attention to events that happened in our lifetimes, or even just a few years ago? “But I’m not dead yet!” we might imagine we hear our subjects protest, not unlike the hapless peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.⁷ For recent history, no matter what else it is, is not a study of a dead past; the pasts we study are still breathing and very much in living memory. And while Monty Python’s peasant could be put out of his misery with a quick and comic hit on the head, we recent historians can’t kill our own subjects so easily. All we can do, presumably, is wait for our pasts to become dead enough to be worthy of historical attention.

There are, to be sure, a few theorists who admit the possibility of a field of historical study focused on a more recent past. John Tosh even posits that studies of the recent past can be particularly useful. Tosh argues that the idea of the difference between “then” and “now” that lies at the foundation of the historical discipline can be found in a more recent past that is compressed into single life span. Citing as examples the cases of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, Tosh argues that those who study more recent events can offer to their readers a “reminder of the deeply alien elements in our recent past.” For Tosh, the recent past can be a subject of historical inquiry as long as that past is different enough from the present. Here, the extent of difference rather than the passage of time becomes the key factor that makes a past historical. In this light, the contemporary historian plays a role similar to a psychoanalyst who forces individuals to face the truth of their personal past: “so the contemporary historian helps us to face the present and the future by enabling us to understand the forces, however shocking, which have made our world and our society what it is.” This language of shock implies that studies of recent events are legitimate only if they can claim to show great differences between the recent past and the present. In other words, as long as the past, even a recent one, is “a foreign country,” as David Lowenthal has famously remarked, then it is worthy of study.⁸

But what if the pasts we study, like my work on interracial marriage and civil rights prosecutions, aren’t all that foreign? What if they address a phenomenon that is still emerging and is provoking new conversations? Philosophers and theorists of history provide little guidance in such cases. Here, I can articulate my own identity crisis: I feel like a historian, I think like a historian, but my own work (given that I study a recent past that is neither dead nor all that foreign) is suspect given the boundaries of the discipline in which I am trained. Pushing back at and testing those boundaries requires, in my experience, that we take seriously some of the methodological challenges that can arise when we write recent history, including issues related to sources, historiography, narrative, and perspective, all topics central to historical thinking. Yet considering those challenges in light of the literature on historical methodology and philosophy that guides our practice more generally suggests that, although there are certainly problems particular to writing about a past that is “not dead yet,” many of the issues that historians of the recent past confront have been the subject of long debate within the profession. We do have guidance. Moreover, having to face those challenges squarely and openly may well offer opportunities for enriching our scholarship and our historical understanding more generally.

The Problem of Sources: Archives, Glut, and Mastery

When I first began writing contemporary history, the aspect of researching a recent past that contributed most to my own concern that perhaps I wasn’t a “real” historian was the nature of my sources. Although all good historians know that our goal is to find as many sources as we can from as many different vantage points as possible, my graduate training communicated very effectively that some kinds of research and some types of sources carried more weight than others in terms of legitimizing work as truly “historical.” Thus, when I proposed a dissertation on interracial marriage, one of my professors protested, “You won’t find any sources!” He feared, of course, that I wouldn’t find any archival sources. (He was wrong, by the way, which is a struggle with which historians of race, sexuality, and women—all the fields I was working in—will be familiar from presenting proposals to doctoral committees.) But my mentor’s concern was plain: if I couldn’t do my research in the archives, no one would take me seriously as a historian.

Lesson #1 from graduate school: sources found in the archives, for some reason, counted more than others.

Sitting around the table in our graduate seminar dissecting the work of other historians conveyed three other subtle but unmistakable lessons about the relationship between research and archival sources: that the best research often involved a detectivelike hunt for that elusive document, or set of documents, that had rarely (if ever) been used before; that textual sources offered the most responsible and careful way of exploring the past; and that a historian must try to master as many sources as possible before sitting down to write. My own research process for both books has borne little resemblance to this ideal: most of my sources are not from the archives and a good number are not textual. I spend less time hunting for elusive sources than I do sifting through thousands of potential (although often repetitive) sources. Given the sheer volume of the available material, if I tried to consult every source available, I would never finish my project. My problem is less in finding sources than in deciding when it’s time to stop researching and start writing.

Although these may not be the lessons conveyed in all graduate programs—I’m sure that some students may have learned more about doing oral history and using oral evidence than I did—I don’t think my training, or the lessons it conveyed about sources, was unique. John Tosh notes in The Pursuit of History that since the age of Leopold von Ranke and the emergence of the modern historical profession, historians have placed more emphasis on textual than on oral sources and have confined most of their research to “libraries and archives.”⁹ Yet those of us who study recent history rarely find that our research conforms to the practices that earn the most favor and acclaim from our fellow historians. Some of us might be able to find information in archives, but they typically have fewer collections about more recent events, and those collections are more likely than older ones to be restricted by privacy and copyright issues. Government documents, moreover, are typically restricted or closed for at least thirty years after an event has taken place.

Instead, many of us turn to other kinds of sources, which present bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Just over Our Shoulder: The Pleasures and Perils of Writing the Recent Past
• Part 1 Framing the Issues
• Part 2 Access to the Archives
• Part 3 Working with Living Subjects
• Part 4 Technology and the Practice of Recent History
• Part 5 Craft ing Narratives
• Contributors
• Index