You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover!

 “How to Read a History Book – The Hidden History of History” by Marshall T. Poe, 2018

This is a somewhat witty and clear story about how academic history books are written.  Poe clearly means it for other academics but also a small public audience, as he avoids jargon.  Liberal Arts academics will find it full of jolts of recognition and some absurdity. Others will find their suspicions confirmed.  The title is somewhat deceptive, as it is not a critique so much as an amusing take on the foibles of the mainstream history ‘profession.’  You want to be a ‘professional’ historian?  You won’t after this.

Poe creates a case study of an imaginary student, Elizabeth Ranke, who is white, upper middle-class and really wants to be a history professor.  Her ‘field of study’ is 1960s radical feminism at a made-up university in Priestly, Westcoastia, which holds a number of primary sources.  She wastes time studying a French philosopher named ‘Darridont,’ who is probably Derrida.  There is even a school slovenly called ‘Oxturd.’  She much later lands a second-tier history job in Ameless, Iowana, a small town full of tractors and drunken football fans.  This gives you an idea of the many ‘thin disguises’ in the book. 

Poe is a full prof at Amherst, UMass but he did attend college in both Iowa and at Berkeley.  He’s published on ‘early, modern’ Russian history too – whatever that is.  He predictably opposes Marxism as ‘dogmatic’ and calls post-1917 Russia ‘Utopistan’ and “The Workers Paradise.”  He was born in Huntsville, Alabama, which might be indicative, then went to high-school in Wichita.  His net worth is $1-5M, so he's solidly in the upper-middle class.  Poe repeatedly mentions that many Universities have gender and skin color requirements for hires, but he never mentions why.  Presently history faculties are mostly gender-balanced according to him.

Meta-Narrative No!

Poe describes nearly all U.S. academic historians as specialists, uninterested in over-arching themes, ‘the big picture’ or ‘meta-narratives,’ as the post-modernists like to say. Socialists have an over-arching narrative, so they are outside this method of history too. The specialists are also contrasted to the academically distained ‘popular’ historians who write for the general public. They use the research of the academics to create their own narratives.  Only a few of these popular historians make any money, so it might be safer to be an academic - or so you might think.  Elizabeth’s journey in writing a history book is really to address other professional feminist historians about one moment in history, in one location, mostly about one group.  Nothing ‘cosmic’ about this, as Poe would say.  What was that about forests and trees?

Poe points out that professional study of history is a relatively new phenomenon.  He introduces the reader to how ‘the German method’ of studying history developed, then came to the U.S. after 1914.  In Germany this involved the creation of graduate seminars, research libraries, the first modern history graduate program, the first professional organization and the first history journal.  Instead of the practice of a few rich ‘gentleman’ historians dabbling in the past, professional ‘history’ now had its own rules and regulations, institutions, governing bodies, standards and practices.

Poe describes in exhausting detail Elizabeth’s long progress through her Ph.D, her struggle with writing a 435 page academic tome, then her attempt to get hired in academe in order to fulfill her life-long career dream.  He doesn’t mention the fact that ‘tenure’ is now a disappearing goal for many academics, or if she accrued debt.  Her lawyer mother had told her that law school was always a backup - but Elizabeth refused to take that path.

Poe makes fun of the 1960s Women's Liberation Mvmt.

Neutrality?

For a Lefty, the healthy vegetable of the book is Poe’s chapter on what history books hide. Elizabeth eventually starts to think about what might have been ‘unsaid’ in her book about 1960s radical academic feminism at ‘Priestly.’  The German model asks the historian to be neutral and impartial but of course as Poe notes, no historian is.  Elizabeth herself was a feminist, her mother was even more radical – and the topic itself is not neutral or apolitical.  Just as the historical docudramas of producers like Ken Burns are loaded with a pre-conceived conservative and neo-liberal worldview, so Elizabeth might suffer from the same thing on the flip side.  Oh, the horror!

She remembers a particular right-wing student – ‘Russ Doubtless’ - she used to argue with as a freshman, and how his religion would have led him to look at different primary sources and take a different Christian conservative tack about this same topic at the same university.  Poe of course doesn’t actually have any evidence of conservative Christian ‘feminism’ at Priestly, so his point is a straw woman.  Nor does he have any proof that what happened was a ‘tragedy’ for women unless you claim that equality itself is tragic – which you’d have to do.  Consider the source, as they say.  But the point stands – the story of history is not purely objective or apolitical, nor can it ever be fully known.  Yet not all opposing histories are equal and there’s the rub.  Facts still exist.

This should not be ground-breaking information, especially to a tenure-track feminist like Elizabeth, her cat, her glasses of wine, her second-tier school or to you, dear reader.  Poe’s description of the Priestly feminists then descends into Tom Wolfe satire, because, hey, even this book has an agenda.  There are bathroom jokes!  Elizabeth finally decides her book was full of jargon, muddled thinking and abstractions, while ignoring certain unpleasant facts.  Poe concludes that there are a lot of lousy academic history books - products of the academic system, vanity, careerism and social blindness.  He contends that none are intended to make it into the internet, film, documentaries or podcasts where most people now consume history, another problem. 

Poe concludes that history books, or even a solid understanding of history, don’t change history, unlike what Santayana said about repetition.  They just clarify facts with which to confront the fake-history fabulists. There is no “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."  He says this is because “people are people” and will always do “war, poverty, oppression” … “over and over, forever.”  What was that about boots stamping on faces forever?  As Mark Fisher might say, Poe's position is so much capitalist realism, but then Poe has been a popular success in his field, so who am I to argue?  The book ends with a maudlin death scene for Elizabeth as she ponders what grounds truth in history.  She concludes it is Utilitarian happiness and ‘love’ that provide its truth. This contradicts his ‘people are (shitty) people’ logic but then muddled thinking is not exclusive to Elizabeth.  In fact his thinking smacks of Christian original sin, a premier example of muddle-headedness and perhaps one the author takes to heart.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Why People Don’t Buy Books,” “The Melancholia of the Working Class,” “Capitalism on Campus,” “The University in Chains” (Giroux); “Furious Feminisms,” “The Debt Trap,” “Professional Degrees in Recent Democratic Party Politics,” “Meridian” (Walker); “Can History Predict the Future?” “Doublespeak,” “Keywords – the New Language of Capitalism,” “Uncomfortable Television,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism and Southern Liberals,” “Democracy in Chains.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist, October 9, 2023