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Reading and Writing History
From: Columbia University
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Eric Foner |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Columbia University history professor Eric Foner (right) is an expert on the American Civil War and Reconstruction and was the president of the American Historical Association for 2000. He is the prizewinning author of many books, including The Story of American Freedom and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. |
Fathom: What five books stand out in your memory as being the most influential to your thinking, writing and scholarship? |
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| Eric Foner talks about The making of The English Working Class, by E.P. Thompson. | |
Eric Foner: The first book is The Making of the English Working Class, which was published in the mid-1960s. I was a student at Columbia University as an undergraduate and a graduate, and I went to Oxford in between on a Kellert Fellowship, but the history that was being taught then was primarily traditional political history and intellectual history. E.P. Thompson's book was really a catalyst in the rise of what we call the new social history, or labor history, and the history of groups--African-Americans, women and others--who had been excluded from the narrative up to that point. |
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| Jacket of The making of the English working class. | |
This is a wonderful book showing you how to think critically about the writing of history and expand the cast of characters. It's a study of British workers in the era from the late eighteenth into the mid-nineteenth century during a period of great economic change. It makes you look at that period from the perspective of ordinary working-class people in the midst of these very radical changes. It's a book about economic and social change, but it's really a book about politics: the French Revolution and its impact in England, the struggle for the right to vote, the Reform Act of 1832 and the repression of political dissent. My own work has tended to be more in the realm of politics, but Thompson showed how you can write about politics in a new way and bring the broad populace into the political narrative. |
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| Eric Foner talks about The History of the Seige of Lisbon, by Jose Saramago. | |
The book influenced much of my subsequent writing, such as my book on Thomas Paine, who was a very important character in Thompson's book. My book on Reconstruction is informed by this effort to bring ordinary people--in this case, emancipated slaves--into the narrative. It has a very profound effect on my thinking about what history is and how you can write it. Moreover, I later came to meet Thompson, and he was a very generous, fascinating, humorous person who opened himself up to helping me out when I was a young student. So his book is especially important to me. |
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| Jacket of The History of the Siege of Lisbon. | |
The History of the Siege of Lisbon is by José Saramago, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Portugal. Despite the title, this is a novel, not a history. The siege of Lisbon took place several hundred years ago and was part of the battle between Catholic Portuguese and Moorish Arabs or Muslims who controlled part of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages; the battle for Lisbon was the final conquest of Portugal from these Arabs. As I said, it is not a narrative of history, exactly, although you learn a lot of history from it. It's really a book about how we think about history, invent history, imagine history and impose our present values on history. |
The protagonist is a proofreader in a publishing house who introduces a change into a history book and sets off a strange series of events, which then lead you to try to figure out what really happened in the siege of Lisbon. It's set in the present and the past at the same time. It's not an easy book to read--the sentences go on interminably, the paragraphs go on for pages. But it's a very profound book about what the writing of history involves, how we reimagine the past and how we impose notions of civilization or barbarism on past events; how the winners and the losers look to us, since we are the descendants of the winners, and how we sort of write the losers out of history, and what kinds of motivations we impose on people of the past. |
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| Eric Foner talks about Black Reconstruction, by W.E.B DuBois. | |
It's a book that I think many historians would do well to read, even though it's not that well known in the US. It was actually recommended to me by a student of mine when I was going on a trip to Europe. I don't get a chance to read novels all that often, because there's so much history coming out that I have to read, but I took this along and read it on the plane and also afterward. It's a very thought-provoking book that I would certainly recommend to anyone who wants to know what historians are doing or should be doing. |
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| Jacket of Black Reconstruction. | |
I first read Black Reconstruction, by W.E.B. DuBois, as a student here at Columbia in a history class with Professor James Shenton. I learned a lot from it, but it was very difficult, and so I put it aside for a long time. It was when I went back to DuBois's book and read it as a scholar that I appreciated the brilliance and the importance of it. It's partly that DuBois anticipates modern views on so many things--slavery, the causes of the Civil War, the role of emancipation in the Civil War, Andrew Johnson, the battles over Reconstruction, what was going on in the South during Reconstruction, the positive achievements of that time against a long historiography that denigrated this period as a great error in American history. |
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| Eric Foner talks about The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. | |
It was also that DuBois was the first to really insist that the voice of former slaves had to be put into the story, and that you couldn't write the history of Reconstruction by just looking at white sources. The final chapter of that book, "The Propaganda of History," is an irrefutable indictment of the historical profession for racism, for mythologizing history completely in the service of white supremacy. The entire system of race segregation, disenfranchisement and racial inequality was bolstered by a vision of history that was legitimized by professional historians for many years. DuBois tried to shatter that. He put this book out there in the mid-1930s, the historical profession ignored it, and then it was rediscovered in the 1960s. It's been over 65 years since it was published, and we're still dealing with the questions DuBois raised. In addition, the book is beautifully, poetically written, and it shows that you can write very excellent history without being dull or pedestrian. It really is full of passion and poetry as well as hard information and research, so it's an interesting model to aspire to, for how to write as well as for the courage it took to put that book out at the time that he did. |
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| Jacket of The Lord of the Rings. | |
The next book, or collection of books, may surprise you, but it is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Of course, this is a very popular series of books, but it played an important role in my life in two rather odd ways. When I was a graduate student studying for my comprehensive oral exams, I got a very useful piece of advice from one of my professors which I pass on to my students today. Of course, they ignore it, but it's this: Stop studying a week or two before the exam. Don't cram, don't overdo it; go out and read something that has nothing to do with history to relax your mind. So the weeks before I took my orals I read the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. |
In an odd sort of way, I later began to realize that this entire history that Tolkien invents gave me a lot of insight into the American Civil War: the contradictions of the American Civil War, and the way the Civil War, at least for the North, became this great struggle to emancipate the slaves and purge American society of the greatest evil that had existed up to that point. And also how the very war effort itself laid the foundation for the great industrial state of the late nineteenth century. Many workers and others in the North suffered great losses because of the war; some people enriched themselves enormously; others fell behind. The war changed the society very much even as it was mobilizing people for this great moral crusade. |
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| Eric Foner talks about The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, by Richard Hofstadter. | |
The message in The Lord of the Rings is, in a way, that the struggle to destroy the evil also destroys the good. The very effort to mobilize against the evil unalterably changes what you're trying to defend. So at the very end of that trilogy, the heroes--Frodo the Hobbit, Gandalf and Elrond--sail away. They can't live in this world that they've created, because it's so different from what they started out to defend. It's a metaphor; Abraham Lincoln didn't sail away, he was killed, but the world after the Civil War was not Lincoln's America anymore. It was a very different world, in some ways better and in other ways much worse, and somehow the Tolkien book suggested that insight to me which I have used in a lot of my writings and teachings ever since. It had a greater influence on my writing of history than one might think from reading my books, even if it's never cited in the footnotes. |
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| Jacket ofThe American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. | |
The American Political Tradition, by my mentor Richard Hofstadter, is not an unusual choice. Many historians were influenced by him. I was fortunate enough to study with Hofstadter as an undergraduate; I wrote a senior thesis under him and I later came back to Columbia and did my dissertation under his direction. Hofstadter's book is a brilliantly written series of vignettes, or studies, of different American political leaders, from the Founding Fathers down to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hofstadter had this brilliant insight that all these guys are basically the same. They all share certain values--capitalist values, laissez-faire values, democratic values, personal ambition values. This is called consensus history. Whether it's Lincoln or Jackson or Roosevelt, they share a certain cynicism, a certain manipulation of politics, but also certain positive values common in American history. |
To me, Hofstadter's book raises the question, one that I've tried to grapple with throughout my career as a historian, about the relationship between political history and social history. There's no easy formula for that; there's no simple way of describing it. I've tried to answer that question in very different ways from him, but the question is the same: How do you write about political ideology and political culture and try to relate it to what's going on in the society? That book was the first I read, really, that brilliantly tried to assess that question. |
Again, it's amazing how many insights of subsequent scholarship, whether it's about Lincoln and race, or the Progressive Era, or the Populists, or Roosevelt, that are anticipated in that book of essays. So it's something I refer to a lot when thinking about the teaching of history, even though it was published in 1948, a long time ago. There aren't a lot of books published in the 1940s that historians are still reading, but that's one of them. And it will certainly endure because of the brilliance of the writing and conceptualization. |
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