I enjoyed reading this article from the front page of today’s Virginia Gazette. Because my community hosts one of the largest living museums in the world (Colonial Williamsburg), it’s impossible for me to escape the lessons of history. Our streets are named for the leaders of colonial Virginia – Duke of Gloucester Street (the main street through Colonial Williamsburg), Francis Nicholson (two streets – Francis Street and Nicholson Street that parallel Duke of Gloucester) and so forth. I run into people wearing colonial-era clothing when I go to the grocery store or library. A statue of George Wythe sits in front of the public library and a seated statue of Thomas Jefferson sits in Merchant Square. Our community newspaper is named the Virginia Gazette, the same name used by several newspapers published in the colonial era.
In its earliest years, Colonial Williamsburg focused on portraying the lives of the elites in Williamsburg – and presented an unrealistic view of their lives at that. With more research over the years, portrayals of the lives of elites became more realistic. In addition, CW has added information and programming featuring the lives of the enslaved individuals who lived in Williamsburg – around 50% of the population at the time of the American Revolution.
This article reveals CW’s reinvigorated focus on the lives of Native Americans who lived in and around Williamsburg. Williamsburg’s American Indian Initiative has been around since 2002 when it was established with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The reason for intensifying this focus is to help visitors see that Native people were a normal part of the fabric of society in colonial Virginia. In the article, the leader of the program quotes Thomas Jefferson, who noted that “not a day goes by” that he didn’t see natives on the streets of Williamsburg.
In addition, the article points out that descendants of the natives who walked the streets in Williamsburg still live in the area today – the Mattaponi (whose reservation is about 37 miles north of Williamsburg) and the Pamunkey (whose reservation is about 10 miles southwest of the Mattaponi reservation). Both tribes were considered important parts of the Powhatan Confederacy, shown in tan on the map below. The program is reaching to descendants of these and other native communities as they development programming.
So why did this story catch my attention today? I’m working on an Osher course that I’ll be teaching in two weeks; the course is called “Interpreting the Past,” and it is about what historians do and how they think. A lot of current political discussion focuses on how history is taught in the public schools – what individuals are featured and what narrative is supported. There is pressure from people who want history to be “just the facts,” while people with a greater understanding of historical thinking and process know that it’s impossible to focus on “just the facts” without some understanding of how the curators of historical knowledge (as imparted both in textbooks and in teacher training programs) select the facts to focus on.
A recent article in Humanities – the journal for the National Endowment for the Humanities – is entitled “All History is Revisionist History.” The point of the article is that the job of the historian is to question the past, not simply to regurgitate it. I have read several places that the collective noun for a group of historians is an “argumentation” of historians. Now, I don’t know who the authoritative source is that determines that a group of geese is a “gaggle” or that a group of owls is a “parliament,” but even if it’s not authoritative, calling a group of historians an “argumentation” is both accurate and helpful. As new sources of information become available – or as historians suggest new questions that can be asked about the past – new historical interpretations emerge and overall knowledge of the past increases. And historians argue about all of it.
We are all familiar with the story of the blind men trying to figure out what an elephant looks like.
Depending on which part of the elephant each man encounters, he comes away with a different impression of what an elephant looks like. We laugh at this because we actually know what an elephant looks like.
I don’t want to torture the analogy, but historians are like the blind men encountering an elephant. If the blind men talk to each other, they can probably get a pretty good picture of what an elephant looks like. In the same fashion, every historian tells the story of the part of the past he has encountered. If the historians exchange information, they get a better idea of what the past looks like. This is what happens in historical journals – historians explain their research and argue about what it means. People like Ken Burns and David McCullough (who are not academic historians) then package the work of historians in palatable morsels for the general public.
Historians have differing views of history – often referred to as “philosophies” or “theories” of history. Most of the people reading this essay are close to my age, and we were probably all taught history based on the Great Man theory. This theory, which dominated historical research and textbooks until about the 1970s, posited that historical events are brought about by the actions of political and military leaders – the “great men” (and they were almost all men) – who held powerful positions in the past. Because this theory made assumptions about how change happened (individual decisions brought about change) the focus was on the people who held these positions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, we saw evidence that the Great Men don’t always make the decisions. Two powerful movements of that time period – the Civil Rights Movement and the antiwar movement – illustrated the power of the “little people” to override what the “great men” wanted to do. A new theory of history emerged – called “social history,” this theory said that change happens because the actions of thousands or millions of individuals demanded the change. This theory of history made room for people who were not included in the Great Man narrative – women and people of color – and asked questions about their role in change. This theory was not new in the 1950s; it had first arisen in France in the 1920s, but it gained traction in the profession of history in the later time period.
It is this movement in the study of history that Colonial Williamsburg has been adapting to over the past 50 years or so. When we include the stories of women in Williamsburg, enslaved persons, or natives, we are encountering different parts of the elephant. However, if schools adapt their history standards, or adopt new textbooks, that reflect the evolving nature of historical understanding, there is often an uproar about “revisionist history.”
A couple of thoughts.
First, all history is revisionist, in that historians are always asking new questions about the past and discovering new things to think, write, and talk about. Anyone who assumes that this is not the job of the historian doesn’t understand what historians do. To expect historians simply to somehow research the past without finding out new things or suggesting a new perspective on the things we already know is to expect them to be boring narrators of history. It would be like suggesting that chemists simply replicate the experiments that prove things everyone already knows. Who would want to do that?
When people complain about “revisionist” history, I ask them about “revisionist” medicine or “revisionist” technology. We are very willing to put aside outmoded ways of thinking in these fields. We also need to be willing to adjust our historical thinking to new information and new understandings.
People sometimes assume that history is a zero-sum game – that to include previously excluded groups means you have to leave out important white men. It is true that classroom time is limited. If including other groups of people means we no longer include William Henry Harrison (he served one month in office), Zachary Taylor (he served a little over a year), or Millard Fillmore (who?) in the history textbooks, that’s probably fine.
No one is talking about ignoring the Great Men of history. Colonial Williamsburg will always hire someone to portray George Washington riding on his white horse down Duke of Gloucester Street. It will always have someone portraying Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. For decades, people have encountered Martha Washington and Clementina Rind (publisher of the Virginia Gazette) around town or in the shops. Now visitors will also encounter people portraying enslaved persons or native individuals – sometimes historical figures whose names we know – to create a more complete picture of what life was like in Colonial Williamsburg.
To insist that an elephant is only a trunk is as bad as insisting that the elephant’s trunk is not important. We need to look at the entire elephant if we want to understand it.
My pastor has a similar view (very common among the clergy, as I understand it) about the Bible. We need to understand the "climate of the times" and what the Hebrew/Greek words the writers used meant at the time. She has done several talks about topics of interest, I. E. What the Bible really says about homosexuality.