Human Professions: History as a Legitimate Field

Most people don't like to be lied to. That's too bad, because you get lied to all the time. Don't think so? Do you watch the news? Then you're being lied to. Read any sections of mainstream news in which you have a skill set (in my case "technology") and you start to notice that they're actually either wrong on have dumbed the information down to a point where the story or advice becomes misleading. One of the major places where mass lying occurs is in public (and probably a lot of private) high schools.

Think you have a good grasp of history with your high school education? Please. Even a general AP U.S. class is full of enough errors, omissions, and shallow analysis to get you into trouble should you attempt to write real history.

There's nothing wrong with this of course; we can't all be experts in everything. Fuck, I still use a calculator to figure out the tip in restaurants. If you ask me how mitosis works I might be able to provide you with an answer, but probably not a good or fully accurate one. That's why we specialize and focus in our respective fields. Everyone does this. Talk to your janitor next time you're in the office. That guy knows his shit when it comes to cleaning (and usually when it comes to wiring and plumbing too). That isn't sarcasm. I have no animosity towards those with menial jobs - as long as they're good at those jobs. That's all I ask for. I don't pretend I could do my janitor's job any more than the janitor could do mine.

Sadly, there is a job in this country whose members usually think they can do everyone's jobs. Those people are called politicians: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/tea-party-tennessee-textbooks-slavery_n_1224157.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false.

This egregious act by legislators is not only disgusting. It's also 100% wrong. Take this quote by a spokesman for the group trying to pass this bill: "[there's] an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another."

"Made-up?" Were the founding fathers the ones "making it up?" Because anyone who knows anything about Jefferson or Washington knows that these men were slaveholders. You know why? Because it's in their fucking records. You know, the ones they kept themselves.

Sadly, morons like this get to influence what your kids learn. The feel-good, apologist historiography mostly died out in professional history in the mid-sixties. No one in the field (or at least no one who expects to be taken seriously) thinks that such a simple view of complex men can exist in history, because the founding fathers were humans and humans are complex. Sadly, hero worship of the founders destroys their usefulness as historical figures, because it paints them as Greek-esque demi-gods with one-dimensional personalities, and their achievements as unreachable by mere mortals. Furthermore, it maligns their vast achievements, making it seem as though they did what they did because they were somehow different, instead of being what they were - human. What they accomplished wasn't easy, and pretending that the success of the Revolution was inevitable because the founders were basically superheroes takes away from their ridiculously difficult-to-achieve successes.

The problem here is that we're treating history like just another profession but without the respect a profession should rightly garner. Reading a few books on medicine and visiting Johns Hopkins doesn't make you a doctor. Yet every year tourists who have read McPherson or Foote rush to Gettysburg, PA (site of my Alma Mater not incidentally) and tell everyone who will listen about their take on "the war." Which is nice, except they aren't really qualified to do that. Some of them are right in what they say. Some aren't. Even the correct analyses tends to be simplistic and focus on facts only, rather than facts and concepts. Again, we stopped doing this in professional history 50 years ago.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not ruling out a "Good Will Hunting" scenario here, but that sort of thing is rare because history is, again, a profession, and most people don't find the right books or do the right kind of analysis just like that. It takes a lot of reading in a lot of different sources, some of which are extremely difficult or expensive to obtain outside of professional history. There's a reason for that. Libraries and archives have to maintain their sources and pay for their upkeep. It's one thing to let a professional historian in for free, especially when his access has been paid for by the institution supporting him, but it's quite another to let in someone who may not really have any idea what he's doing so that he can go write a book vindicating his great granddaddy by cherry-picking his sources.

Speaking of cherry-picking, we have a thing in history called "peer review." That means that if you write a book that used some questionable practices, the rest of the community is going to make sure you're called out on it. We won't be mean (unless you really suck), but yeah, people are gonna know what you did.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The same thing happens in science. That's why you don't get scientific papers about creationism. It's also why, in my field, you don't get a lot of papers that espouse the Lost Cause mythology or the ultra-simplistic view of the founders as saints. That stuff stays where it belongs: in pop and amateur culture, just like books on creationism or how to survive the coming apocalypse.

I won't pretend that there's no political wrangling in my field, but no more or less than in other fields, such as medicine and law. Yet we still trust doctors and... uh... well, we trust doctors.

In all seriousness, however, you trust professionals, because they are just that: professionals. They went to school and learned their shit. They studied and discussed with other aspiring experts and they understand the technical and theoretical necessities of their jobs. If you don't think you can be the pitcher for the New York Yankees or perform open-heart surgery, what makes you think you can tell Ira Berlin that he's full of shit? (Spoiler: he's not.)

Sadly, lack of regard for history, and a variety of other humanities, as a real profession is what leads to Tennessee wanting to teach your kids that people who openly admitted to holding slaves didn't own slaves. Because they assume that they can legislate what did or did not occur in our history. We might not know for sure, but we have a better idea than you do, and let me tell you something: Jefferson was a massive hypocrite and even back then, people knew it. I know that because, unlike Tennessee, I read a variety of letters and other primary sources that indicate this pretty heavily and I do know what I'm talking about.

So you know what, Tennessee? Shove it up your ass. It's one thing to espouse a Wood-esque take on history. It's another to openly lie to children. If you can't do history right, at least do me a favor and leave it to the professionals.