Lisa Clark Diller

I will admit to having been a re-enactment virgin until the weekend of September 21, 2013.  As readers of this blog are well aware, we are in the midst of all things Civil War in the United States. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is marking its own big battles all this fall. 
Specifically, the engagements at Chickamauga occurred 150 years ago, September 19-20.    As someone whose research reflects a great deal on another civil war (one in England in the 1640s), I have tended to smile blithely through local history enthusiasts’ explanations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the role played by East Tennessee in that conflict.

However, as a teacher of a first year seminar who is always looking for the required “bonding experience” for my students, this year it seemed appropriate to participate in some local history.  I don’t think this was one of the most effectively executed re-enactments (others with more experience have confirmed this opinion).  But the weather was lovely, the setting beautiful, and my students seemed to have a good time.

It made me start thinking about the role of such events as educational opportunities.  What is the purpose of re-enactments of battles for historical education? The re-enactments seem to me to be a bit different than the interpretations offered in museums and on walking tours. Those of you who study public history can perhaps straighten me out on this. I can guess why the people participating might be enjoying themselves. I can see why communities might want to watch them. But when it comes to serving the goals of education—what is going on here?  I am specifically thinking about the “so what?” of history.  I quizzed my students before and after the event regarding what they thought this experience revealed of the “so what?” of historical thinking and skill-building.  Here are some of their comments:

These are not the most nuanced observations, but my own experience is so thin that I’m sure I lost teaching moments over the course of the day.  Perhaps I can blame the poor quality of the event itself. 

Fellow HS blogger Eric Schultz’s experience at Gettysburg was much richer—and his description of all the learning opportunities available to people visiting the park reflect the best of what our National Park Service has to offer.  Since reenactments aren’t allowed in the park itself, and this event took place a good 45-minute drive away from Chickamauga battlefield, the observers here weren’t able to easily take advantage of all the resources the NPS offers.

I am interested in what readers of this blog think is useful about military reenactments in terms of pedagogy or historical thinking.  I realize work has been done on the culture of reenactment itself (see here and here), so I’m not thinking as much of the actual participants.  But how can we use the widespread and deep interest in this phenomenon to teach some of the skills of historical thinking?  How much preparation might our students need ahead of time?  Are there usually interpreters explaining what is happening in terms of military strategy, etc, as the visitors watch the efforts of the reenactors?  What experiences have the rest of you had?

From Puck magazine, 1912.

Benjamin Railton

In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community.

For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigrants not arriving from China or related Asian nations, and that between 1921 and 1965 the quota laws were directly based on ethnic/national discrimination. Yet most Americans have no sense of that history.

So how do we public scholars bridge that gap? How do we produce work that can speak both to academics and general readers? For me, the answer lies, at least in part, in a two-pronged approach: in my Introduction I explicitly address these questions for fellow academics, arguing that we scholars need to do more to bring our shared knowledge to broader public audiences; and then my three main chapters represent case studies in that approach, that is, efforts to write about subjects currently of interest to academic historians in such a way that will also enlighten a broader audience.

As I take the next steps with the project, seeking spaces and conversations where I can share its ideas, I continue to consider these questions, and to work on finding a voice and approach that can speak to different communities. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject and, of course, on the book!

Ben Railton is associate professor of English and coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University. He is the author of Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893 (University of Alabama Press, 2007). He maintains the daily AmericanStudies blog (http://americanstudier.blogspot.com).

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

"Length of the average dissertation," from FlowData.

This chart initiated a round of chest thumping by academic historians. Apparently we historians write the longest dissertations. Now, according to this chart, philosophers and classicists do not write dissertations, when in fact they do. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chart is correct. What does it tell us about historians? Either we do more research than scholars in any other field (unlikely from my interdisciplinary vantage point), or we are less able to articulate our findings in a pithy manner than our colleagues in other departments on campus.

When I made a snide remark about length on Facebook, my historian friends jumped to the defense of 325 page dissertations as the necessary length for a monograph. Other fields publish articles rather than books. Thus, the argument went, they can get away with less. This perplexed me. A doctoral dissertation no matter the field should demonstrate an original contribution to knowledge, right?

Last time I checked, one can’t measure originality with a ruler or a word count. The Encyclopedia Britannica used to fill rows of shelves, but it contained less innovation than the napkin upon which
Watson and Crick drew the double helix. I am a fan of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. It makes a mighty doorstop as well as an excellent overview of 18th-century political theory, but Madison’s concise constitution brought bigger results in fewer words.

Historians have never been certain whether we rank among humanists or social scientists. Do we weave tales or devise algorithms from the infinite human variables hidden in the past? Is our fundamental task to describe the human experience or analyze it? If the former, no wonder we run on so long. The infinite permutations of personal experience stand at odds with the virtues of pithy prose. We forgive Dickens and Dostoevsky their length for this reason, but should they serve as historians’ role models? According to the chart, anthropologists, whose ethnographic methodologies hinge upon description, nip at historians’ lengthy heels. Einstein captured rather a lot with E=MC2, that’s why mathematicians and physicists come in comfortably under 200 words.

I think most historians have had the experience of reading a brilliant, incisive essay in a journal or collected volume then trudged through the book that expanded the same analysis from 30 to 300 plus pages. The extra examples and paths through the past make us fall in love with our own research, but how many of our readers—even other historians—care?

A few days before the dissertation chart made the internet rounds, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow George Saunders spoke about his artistic practice as a short story writer on my campus. Years ago, I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies followed by The Namesake. Each of her short stories in the former Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection established a cast of characters, or—if you will—derived an equation constituted of characters as complex as that in the later novel. The novel (begun as a novella) attempted to propel the characters through a narrative/solve the equation with less critical acclaim. My equation analogy for Lahiri’s work came to mind as Saunders described his education as an engineer and his thrill when he takes ten pages and pares them down to one page of perfect prose. I tell my students to think of one page essays as a reduction sauce. Simmer off the excess and leave me with pure flavor. Like a good engineer who seeks to solve a problem, simplify the equation.

Saunders noted that novelists make more money than writers of short stories. Historical essayists such as John Murrin and Bob Scribner never earn the royalties garnered by Gordon Wood or Stephen Ozment, let alone journalists cum historians David McCollough or Barbara Tuchman. Do historians seek an added intellectual value in books or a shot at big bucks and the ultimate money-earner, a movie? These books and films definitely reach a wider audience outside the classroom, but do they convey as much useful information as a tightly argued article assigned in an undergraduate seminar? Size clearly matters, but why and how?