Grant Wong, JDP History '21, served as the JBHR's Editor-in-Chief in 2020-2021. In this piece, he reminisces on his experiences with the journal and its growth over the years. Grant is currently earning his PhD in history at the University of South Carolina. If there’s anything I learned from being Editor-in-Chief of the James Blair Historical Review — forever and always “the premier, peer-reviewed undergraduate history research publication at the College of William & Mary” — it’s that a good historian never stops learning.
Is this a clichéd, uncontroversial, and uninspired take? Of course it is. But it’s true all the same. When I first joined the staff of the JBHR as a peer reviewer in my freshman year, I can’t say I knew very much of anything, let alone history. I suppose I was just critically minded enough to make the cut. I made it in the same year that I learned historians could disagree with each other and that it isn’t a good idea to read Mark Twain literally. That’s college. You live and you learn in the hope that one day you’ll know enough to not have to learn more, until you realize you’re missing the point. There’s always more to know. Slowly but surely, I progressed, getting a better sense of what exactly “history” is. As a third-year History Ph.D. student at the University of South Carolina, I can now say with greater certainty that history is a messy combination of subjective interpretation and scientific logic. It is impossible to write history without making some sort of argument about the past. This truism is inherent to the craft. To say something—anything—meaningful about history from a scholarly perspective, one must make their case for why they think the past was how it was and why this matters (the argument) using what fragmentary evidence of it they can muster (primary sources) to contribute to an ongoing conversation about why we’re getting it right or wrong, or whether we’re even asking the correct questions to begin with (engaging with historiography). The toughest part of all this is the fact that because history is an art founded upon the interpretation of evidence, it’s impossible to get entirely right, and it’s always possible to get wrong. Joining the JBHR as a peer reviewer, I learned what it meant to read, write, and understand history by critiquing it. What is this article saying? Is its argument supported by the evidence it presents? If so, does it make a good enough case for any of us to care about what it’s saying? These are the questions every peer reviewer asks and answers of every single article submitted to the JBHR. No article stops there, as all submissions still go through the Editorial Board, who, with the guidance of the peer reviewers’ hard-earned assessments, evaluate the work all over again. As it happens, by the time I was appointed the next Editor-in-Chief of the JBHR on the eve of my senior year, I, alongside pretty much everyone else in my generation, collectively realized we were living through times that would undoubtedly make history. It was the spring of 2020: the season of COVID-19, George Floyd, and Donald Trump. It would be dishonest for me to say that I went into my new position with a well-thought-out, socially conscious vision of speaking truth to power. Still, what was happening in the world around me certainly compelled me to strengthen a publication that could help people better understand how we got here. No academic journal will ever get as big a readership as The New York Times, and as much as I love the JBHR, I doubt it’ll ever enjoy the reach of The Flat Hat. But that’s not to say that it’s unimportant; far from it. What the JBHR does—what all historical journals do—is cultivate our collective understanding of the past by giving a platform to thoughtful, rigorous, original, and engaging historical research. Beyond this, those who work for such journals constantly learn by doing. Every peer review is a new lesson learned in reading, writing, and understanding. Even those resilient student-historians whose scholarship is rejected by the JBHR will come away from its submissions process having learned something, as the Editorial Board provides their peer reviewer feedback to the authors of every article they consider. This is the ideal for an academic journal, and as Editor-in-Chief, I tried as best as I could to realize this in practice with the JBHR. My aims were twofold: first, publish a journal my staff and I could be proud of, and second, rebuild the JBHR into a student organization with real staying power. I’ll fully admit the JBHR was on uncertain ground for much of my tenure, as just before I became Editor-in-Chief, the curveball of COVID-19 forced the journal into hiatus just as most of its Editorial Board was about to graduate. I say “most” because I was on it, albeit in the obsolete role of “Webpage Manager,” which was separate from the journal’s governance and just involved uploading articles to the journal’s ScholarWorks page. Through the summer and fall of 2020, I reviewed applications for the Editorial Board, making my picks largely off gut instinct, and began recruiting a new cohort of peer reviewers. Once I had everyone assembled, we hit the ground running. I would be remiss if I didn’t credit my team one last time. Zachary Clary, Kevin Diestelow, Claire Nevin, Italia Gorski, Xavier Storey, Gracie Patten, Sophia Moustaid, Grace Tramack, and all my peer reviewers made the JBHR what it was, supporting my vision for a journal that could last. Their work wasn’t easy, especially as COVID-19 continued to loom over our lives that academic year, forcing us to meet virtually and stress the hectic workloads inherent to the life of the TWAMP. (Do people still say that?) Baffled as I am by all things technical and financial, it was thanks to my Editorial Board that we secured Media Council funding, revised our approach to formatting the journal, created a new system of peer review training, and powered our way through the large backlog of submissions we brought on ourselves by expanding our outreach. For my part, I led the revisions to an outdated organizational constitution that allowed the Editor-in-Chief to singlehandedly appoint their successor and dismiss anyone from the journal at a whim. That was a fun meeting. I can’t claim we were successful in everything we did. A few peer reviewers left due to the sheer fatigue of that year, as well as an unfortunate confusion of peer reviewing for fact-checking. Ambitious initiatives foundered as we focused on simply keeping the journal alive. The JBHR blog, for instance, was a defunct project from my tenure that, thanks to the journal’s current staff, is seeing the light of day again in 2024. And speaking as one of the few people of color to serve on the Review’s Editorial Board, I would have liked to have done more to encourage greater racial and ethnic diversity within our staff. In the end, we published two excellent issues and restored the JBHR to a print publication. We did our part. The Review still exists, which I consider an unqualified success after all the tumult of the 2020-2021 academic year. Of course, I cannot claim any of this credit as my own. I’d have been nothing as Editor-in-Chief without my staff, and the current JBHR owes everything to the cohorts that succeeded mine, in all senses of the word. I’ve never been so happy to be surpassed. That’s the JBHR for you. Like the history it publishes, it is a perpetual work-in-progress. As I find myself learning and re-learning everything I know about the past and the present in my life as a Ph.D. student, I’m comforted by the fact that the JBHR too has continued to change. I can’t say it’s my baby anymore. It’s become something entirely new, and it’s all the better for it. It may not even be the James Blair Historical Review for much longer. The journal is currently exploring a renaming in light of Blair’s role in making the College a slaveholding institution, a move I fully support. We’ll both keep on growing and learning, and learning by doing.
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Josiah Canon DeSarro-Raynal, JDP History '25 and incoming JBHR Submissions Editor, reflects on the formation of memory in the wake of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) in both its organic and national manifestations. The Siege of Leningrad is one of the most horrific episodes in Soviet history, if not in all of human history. Estimates suggest that nearly 1.5 million people died during the prolonged fighting that lasted more than two years, making it, as Noah Krasman aptly describes, “one of the most tragic losses of civilian life [in] modern warfare.”[1] Many historians have studied the Siege and explored it in various contexts, including broader studies of World War II or the Soviet Union; David Glantz’s The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944 is a prime example of a thorough look into the event, and it concludes that the battle “has no peer” in terms of drama, symbolism, and sheer human suffering.[2] Other historians, such as Alexis Peri and Lisa Kirschenbaum, have focused on historical memory or the social history of the Siege. The Siege of Leningrad acted as a fulcrum around which collective memory in the Soviet Union revolved; the event both enabled the Soviet population to acknowledge their own historical significance and played a major role in the State-led process of solidifying a shared identity for the country and its citizens based on the pre-existing historical narrative in which the city was perceived.
Analysis of Leningraders’ memory-producing activities during the Siege reveals (1) a collective self-awareness that they were undergoing a critical moment in history and (2) that they sought to find meaning in their experiences through situating them in relation to the past.[3] Such activities demonstrate how memory was understood in the context of the city’s history as an important symbol of tradition and culture in both Russian and Soviet traditions. This study focuses on Leningrad’s impact on the collective memory in the Soviet Union, not the collective memory of Leningrad;[4] it is not a comprehensive analysis, but a precise exploration into how collective memory was formed and altered by the experience of the Siege. The impact of the Siege of Leningrad on collective memory can only be understood after consideration of Leningrad’s position in broader historical narratives. The larger history of Leningrad begins with the city’s founding as St Petersburg in the early eighteenth century as a window to the west, through which modern European thought would enter Imperial Russia, at least in the vision of then-Tsar Peter the Great. A sense of falseness pervaded the city because it was artificially constructed for a determined purpose. In the decades preceding the war, the city’s inhabitants, or Leningraders, were encouraged to conceive of themselves as “participating in a grand, glorious, and historic march to the radiant future.”[5] Leningrad’s status as the cradle of the revolution was instrumental to its identity in the years leading up to World War II; that idea promulgated the city’s connection to the entire nation. As Glantz states, the city represented a “bastion of socialism and Russian national identity.”[6] While Moscow became the nation’s capital, Leningrad kept an authoritative status in Russian history, constructed upon a tradition reaching back centuries.[7] The city was a testament to the triumph of the Soviet state while it also maintained the memory of a glorious Russian past. A history dating back to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 contained a perceived continuous struggle against the hostile West, at the forefront of which stood Leningrad due to its position as the focal point of the overarching historical narrative and site of particularly era-defining moments.[8] A long tradition of mythologizing the city through literature and other artistic expressions persisted, particularly following the Civil War in the 1920s.[9] Such a tendency laid the groundwork for intense self-understanding during World War II among its inhabitants as figures on a historical stage that bridged generations but was still united by the idea of constant place.[10] This process of self-actualization took place in the forms of many memory-producing activities. The war, and specifically the Siege of Leningrad, provided both the state and individuals the space to collectively and clearly realize themselves in a historical narrative, even if that narrative was based on a conflated mythology; the experience at Leningrad was essential to this self-realization both because it demonstrated an instance in which the country overcame unimaginable terrors of war and served as a further historical moment in the pre-existing narrative maintained by the city itself as a national symbol.[11] Lisa Kirschenbaum’s definitive study on the memory of the Siege of Leningrad thoroughly investigates how the experience was understood during and after the War throughout Soviet history.[12] She prefaces her in-depth exploration with fixed definitions of “memory” as “the elements in this amalgam [of public and collective experience] that are primarily personal or autobiographical”[13] and “myth” as “the shared narratives that give form and meaning to the recall of past experience.”[14] These elucidations provide a framework for understanding what can be characterized as memory-producing activities. During the Siege, both Leningraders and the state participated in such practices (occasionally working together), which included keeping diaries, representing the siege and the broader war in a variety of artforms such as film and literature, and establishing memorials to the people’s efforts for the city’s defense,[15] in an attempt to, as Alexis Peri states, “interpret the historical significance of the war,”[16] and, more pressingly, make sense of their suffering.[17] This widespread historical documentation of the Siege even as it was happening demonstrates the inhabitants’ recognition for the moment’s historical dimension.[18] War provoked drastic shifts in peoples’ dispositions and practices with regard to their interaction with their surroundings;[19] Leningrad, with its legacy as a central setting to major events in both the Russian and Soviet historical narratives, enabled this shift to take full effect, resulting in a fundamental self-realization among its people as actors in history. While Leningraders drew on their collective experiences under siege, they engaged in memory-producing activities on mostly personal terms; these individual experiences were often then shared and publicized, “to endow private loss with public recognition and meaning.”[20] Despite the prevalence of personal-oriented activities, some individuals came together to construct memorials and make commemorations, beginning in the first year of the siege.[21] However, one of the most notable practices that Leningraders made during the siege in efforts to discern meaning of their plight was the keeping of diaries, a phenomenon that has come under detailed study by historians. Facilitated by encouragement from the Soviet state to keep diaries and other autobiographical writings,[22] the besieged inhabitants of the city maintained a “historicist mindset.”[23] These practices gave people a chance to consider their surroundings and the existing historical narrative permeating Leningrad.[24] For Leningraders, diary writing embodied the means to reflect and recognize the history occurring around them in a personal basis, resulting in a broad range of firsthand interpretations of the Siege. Despite this wide variety of representations, a common theme in many diaries of Leningrad’s inhabitants was the “rediscovery of urban beauty.”[25] The condition of war initiated a search in the city’s past; the legacy of Peter the Great was considered and coexisted alongside the siege experience.[26] Writers and artists were inspired by historical imagery and some interpreted the city during siege as an “unreal artifact” in comparison to prewar Soviet Leningrad.[27] In their vivid descriptions of hardship and hunger, many diarists reflected on parallels between the Siege and Leningrad in 1919 during the Civil War.[28] Diaries and other such “small stories” written during the Siege demonstrate individual engagement with a pre-existing historical narrative into which the author incorporated themselves. Such accounts, when set in comparison with one another, reveal a shared sense of deep tragedy,[29] thus indicating the emergence of collective memory. The Leningrader’s self-contextualization resulted in the production of a myriad of material that scholars have identified as primary sources in their studies of the Siege. As historians have increasingly turned to studying the human element behind the Leningrad Blockade,[30] authors like Lisa Kirschenbaum have shown that these sources demonstrate the formation of a collective memory among those who would become the survivors of the Siege. All of these memory-producing practices were closely and directly informed by the situation in which Leningraders found themselves during the Siege. A complex combination of factors ranging from the day-to-day experiences of the city’s inhabitants under bombardment from the German army, the pre-existing historical narrative that the city maintained, and pressing reality of starvation affecting the millions of Leningraders, played an important role in the construction of the cultural environment.[31] That circumstance served as both contextual setting for memory-producing activities and as an object to relate to for Leningraders, who often drew meaning from the “stories of the so-called Leningrad epic.”[32] Finding meaning in setting themselves within a historical narrative was the primary reason behind individual’s engagement in activities like diary-keeping, reconstructing the landscape in various artistic representations, and private investigations and research of history.[33] Polina Barskova’s 2010 journal article investigates how the city itself was understood during the war, exploring aesthetics, portrayal, and self-reflection; she determines that despite the intense physical and psychological trauma of everyday life, Leningraders reveled in aesthetic pleasure in a “response to the beauty of their environment.”[34] The city’s inhabitants identified both peril and beauty in their lives under siege;[35] this interplay of images manifests in the survivors’ accounts, as people hoped for, as Lisa Kirschenbaum identifies, “promises of rebirth and redemption.”[36] In the documentation of life during the Siege, people looked for any quality of beauty in city, to contrast with the immense pain of everyday life;[37] such moments were captured and recorded in a multitude of diaries and other autobiographical texts. State officials and Party infrastructure emboldened the population to see local events occurring within the siege as heroic and worthy of historical record.[38] Therefore, in producing commemorative material during and after the Siege, Leningraders recognized themselves and their personal stories as actors in the established “Leningrad epic.”[39] The situation and longstanding history of the city played a central role in many people’s representations of their circumstances. The wide variety of practices where the Soviet people realized themselves in a historically significant moment can be characterized as channels through which individual memory was formed. Leningrad’s impact is an essential catalyst to initiating this formation process, since its already-in-place status as a national symbol directly connected the individual interpretations of the collective experience to each other, to the city, and to the nation. A merging of these ideas was facilitated during commemoration initiatives. Equating individuals’ experiences with those of the city and the nation was a commonality in many state-led memorials.[40] Kirschenbaum finds that “Although official commemorations of the siege ‘romanticized’ their everyday experiences, Leningraders nonetheless recognized themselves and their personal stories in the state’s productions.”[41] Mirroring the efforts of the state to connect personal experiences to national struggle as a means of creating emotional authenticity,[42] the survivors the Siege also sought to make such connections so that they could make sense of their own suffering. The process of merging their personal experiences with those of the city and the nation was conducted through Leningraders’ keeping of diaries and the creation of artistic representations of the circumstances of the Siege. Such productions have then been used by historians as evident of memory; this characterization is appropriate because the practices of documenting directly engaged with the past and the present in a historical sense. Only Leningrad’s monolithic status as a place essential to the Russian historical narrative provided the inhabitants the ability to fully establish themselves within that narrative, prompted by the shared experiences under siege conditions. The effect of the Siege of Leningrad on collective memory in the Soviet Union cannot be overstated. Facing some of the most horrifying conditions for more than two years, the people of the city engaged in commemorative projects and memory-producing activities. In doing so they relied upon a pre-existing historical basis as they set their experiences in relation to the past to events across history yet united by place led to the realization of self in a historical narrative. Kirschenbaum summarizes The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad in stating that historians “can trace the fallout of war through survivors’ long-term efforts as individuals and as a community to live with and make sense of their memories – in part by constructing and assimilating consoling myths, in part by adapting myths to the difficult circumstances of postwar and post-Soviet life.”[43] Determining that how people remembered the Siege of Leningrad was both initiated by and situated in a broader memory narrative reliant upon the sense of Leningrad as a place proves that the Siege constituted a fulcrum around which collective memory hinged. Notes [1] Noah Krasman, “The Paradox of Genocide in Modern Russia: Evolving Narratives of the Siege of Leningrad During the ‘Great Patriotic Operation’” in Journal of Genocide Research 25 no. 3-4 (2023), 403. [2] David M. Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 470. [3] Alexis Peri, “Revisiting the Past: History and Historical Memory during the Leningrad Blockade,” in The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38 (2011), 127. [4] See Lisa A. Kirschenbaum’s The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) for a such a work. [5] Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 103. [6] Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad, 459. [7] Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 17-18. [8] Peri, “Revisiting the Past,” 108-109, 122, 127. [9] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 14-15. [10] Kirschenbaum, 14. [11] Krasman, “The Paradox of Genocide,” 407. [12] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 3. [13] Kirschenbaum, 6. [14] Kirschenbaum, 7. [15] Kirschenbaum, 1. [16] Peri, “Revisiting the Past,” 106. [17] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 40. [18] Yvonne Pörzgen, “Siege Memory - Besieged Memory? Heroism and Suffering in St Petersburg Museums dedicated to the Siege of Leningrad,” in Museum & Society 14: 3 (November 2016), 416. [19] Jeffrey K. Hass, “Anchors, Habitus, and Practices Besieged by War: Women and Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad,” in Sociological Forum 32: 2 (June 2017), 254. [20] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 79. [21] Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “Commemorations of the siege of Leningrad,” in The Memory of Catastrophe, eds. Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 106. [22] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 16 and Peri, “Revisiting the Past,” 112. [23] Peri, “Revisiting the Past,” 127. [24] Polina, Barskova, “The Spectacle of the Besieged City: Repurposing Cultural Memory in Leningrad, 1941-1944,” in Slavic Review 69: 2 (Summer 2010), 336. [25] Barskova, “The Spectacle,” 336 and Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 15. [26] Barskova, “The Spectacle,” 343. [27] Barskova, 346. [28] Peri, “Revisiting the Past,” 116, 119-121. [29] Cynthia Simmons, and Nina Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 210 [30] Aleksandr N. Chistikov, “Revisiting the Leningrad Blockade,” in Russian Studies in History 52: 2 (Fall 2013), 4. [31] Peri, “Revisiting the Past,” 110 [32] Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “Nothing Is Forgotten: Individual Memory and the Myth of the Great Patriotic War,” in Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe, eds. Frank Beiss and Robert G. Moeller (New York, 2010), 69. [33] Peri, “Revisiting the Past,” 106 and 129. [34] Barskova, “The Spectacle,” 330-331. [35] Barskova, 335. [36] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 28. [37] Barskova, “The Spectacle,” 355. [38] Barskova 78. [39] Kirschenbaum, “Commemorations of the siege,” 107. [40] Kirschenbaum, 111 and 115. [41] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 96. [42] Kirschenbaum, “Commemorations of the siege,” 106. [43] Kirschenbaum, The Legacy, 297. Evelyn Waddick is a junior studying History and Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at William & Mary and the University of St Andrews. In this piece, she analyzes interpretations of the French Revolution from the 19th century to modern day to explore how institutional biases in historical writing change over time. Emotions and opinions easily guide the pen as writers produce everything from partial accounts of daily life in personal diaries to biased articles in newspapers. Taken to the academic level, such bias becomes less personal and more institutionalized when the historian interprets their subject. As the process of historical writing leads historians to narrow the scope of their work, they choose a theme to guide their research. This theme usually corresponds to a particular school of historiography, the focus of which influences which facts historians select to include in their research and conclusions. This “selection of facts...is the result of a choice, even though that choice is not an explicit one,” and in this way, history writing processes the past and creates biased, academic interpretations of collective memory. [1] While the process of writing history creates narratives defined by bias, it also encourages the proliferation of alternate interpretations of the same event. The ability of the historian to select facts and present specific narratives appears clearly throughout the historiography of the French Revolution, a topic on which an enormous amount of scholarship has and continues to be conducted. [2] The diversity and depth of academic discussion generated in this historiography provides an opportunity to observe how biases in history writing appear over time, and think critically about how the historian intentionally or inadvertently adopts bias over the course of writing. Through analyzing the development of French Revolution historiography then, this essay seeks to demonstrate that scholarly discourse treats but never fully heals the blemished historical record of its biases. Such discourse generates an increase in the volume of literature available on a given subject, refining histories by opening the historian’s mind to nuances; it also encourages historians to dilute the biases of their predecessors with their own work in the spirit of poststructuralism. Additionally, two types of authors across three different eras of French Revolutionary historiography will be identified, and the biases which arise from their proximity in time to the Revolution will be discussed. Beginning as soon as 1818 with the publication of Germaine de Staël’s Consideration of the principal events of the French Revolution and continuing through Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1856 work The Old Regime and the Revolution, the nineteenth century history of the French Revolution clung to the biases of living memory. [3] Characterized by its contribution to the anti-Bourbon politics of the early nineteenth century and interest in explaining why the Revolution occurred, histories written from Staël through Tocqueville typically articulate positive, Liberal views of the Revolution. [4] In this era immediately prior to and during the work of von Ranke, historical writing as it is known today was in its infancy. Private individuals wrote histories firstly to advocate a cause through a historical line of reasoning, and secondly to record the events of the Revolution and offer interpretations as to its significance. One such example of Revolutionary history “for a cause” is the work of Hippolyte Taine, who analyzed the Terror for political purposes: “it was heedless adherence to abstract ideology of democracy that had been responsible for rejection of royal proposals of June 1789 by the national assembly, fatally opening the floodgates to mob anarchy and terror.” [5] Seeking to provide a politically relevant answer to why the Terror occurred, Taine’s suggestion of excessive democracy as a culprit held weight, as he articulated this thesis during the early years of the Third Republic, and “until the Republic had weathered the crisis of its first decades, this interpretation hung over it like a pall.” [6] In this way, early authors like Taine who used history as evidence to support a political interpretation demonstrate a powerful application of biased histories, as through the selection of specific facts. Taine linked excessive democracy to terror, allowing the implications of this connection to escape from the historian’s box into society. However, political biases in French Revolutionary history is not limited to the nineteenth century, but are observable again in academic work generated during bicentenary celebrations in 1989, a discussion of which follows later in this essay. Historical writing on the Revolution from the nineteenth century also demonstrates how personal biases manifested and receded in early French Revolutionary historiography as elapsed time placed historians within or outside the era of their subjects. Although Staël created a history when she recorded the events of the Revolution, she biased her account when she included within it opinions on constitutional monarchy as a solution to the Revolution, and personal memories of her father as Financial Minister to Louis XVI. [7] Living before, during, and after the Revolution, Staël’s lifespan put her in contact with her subject matter, rendering her prone to writing history infused with firsthand biases. Such history is not without its uses however, as she was more directly exposed to the environment of the Revolutionary era than an author such as Tocqueville, who was born in 1805. Staël’s 1818 work may then be better regarded as a primary source, whereas Tocqueville’s Liberal history more appropriately forms the source material and basis of French Revolutionary historiography. The validity of his work as a history becomes further supported in the canon as it influenced future interpretations of the Revolution from writers such as Marx and Furet, as they actively chose to build upon Tocqueville. Following Tocqueville, a Marxist interpretation of the Revolution cropped up in the nineteenth century and established itself as the orthodox interpretation of Revolutionary events and significance until the revisionist era of the 1970s. [8] Critically, this Marxist orthodoxy took over French Revolutionary historiography during the century in which history solidified into a practicable, academic profession. As historians in the era of the Marxist interpretation wrote on an event distanced from their own lives, personal biases like those of Staël and academic biases like Tocqueville’s liberal emphasis on 1789 receded into the background. It was the biases of the Marxist interpretation which then ran rampant throughout the literature, as historians viewed the Revolution through a lens of class struggle and subsequently altered the biases of the history to accommodate a Marxist worldview. [9] In this manner, interpreting the French Revolution as a historian in the Marxist school of thought created an entirely new understanding of the Revolution as inherently bourgeois, an example of an emerging class moving to establish their capitalist system over the feudal one of the Old Regime. [10] Therefore, the narrative focus on class struggle as a driving force eclipsed the historical narrative of the nineteenth century, which sought to understand the Revolution in terms of a lack of and excess in democracy. [11] The Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution fit with wider trends in professional history writing during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and explained the Revolution in a way which enabled historians to develop straightforward lines of reasoning. [12] Previously difficult to explain moments and components of the Revolutionary period, such as the Terror and role of King Louis XVI, could suddenly be understood through the lens of a class struggle; the Terror became the result of proletariat anger following a fundamentally bourgeois revolution which deposed the King, who was too stupid to control the chaos. [13] However, by the 1960s the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution began to crumble under pressure from the new biases of historians writing during the political climate of the cold war. [14] During this era of political strife between the Communist and Capitalist worlds, anti-Marxist revisionist histories appeared on English and American printing presses and academic journals where Marxist interpretations once reigned supreme. Even in France, a country where socialism remained popular, the academic work of Sorbonne scholars such as Georges Lebevre and Albert Soboul reacted to political pressures and moved away from the views of colleagues such as Jean Juares and Albert Mathiez, who cemented the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution in France in the 1920s and 30s. [15] In particular, the work of English scholar Alfred Cobban pushed anti-Marxist revisionist histories of the Revolution to the front of historical debate. Cobban’s 1955 The Myth of the French Revolution successfully convinced many of his colleagues that the idea of a capitalist bourgeoisie over throwing a feudal aristocracy was actually false, as he referred to empirical data to prove that only thirteen percent of the national assembly were involved in capitalist commerce, whereas two thirds practiced law for a living. [16] In this way, Cobban’s thesis posited that the Revolution ought to be attributed to bitterness from a middling class of lawyers and other office holders who coveted roles exclusive to the nobility, rather than a revolution of capitalists against a feudal regime. [17] Opening a new era of revisionist debate and historical record refinement by questioning the role of capitalism in the Revolution, Cobban naturally faced criticism. Charged with avoiding the core of the Marxist interpretation, the idea that “the events of 1789 originated in a conflict between the nobility and bourgeoisie,” historians moved to revise what Cobban did not by examining the bourgeoisie class versus the nobility. [18] They found that empirical evidence demonstrated that the bourgeois and the aristocracy were actually closer in character and lifestyle than the Marxist interpretation would allow, discovering that the bourgeoisie actually benefited from the same rights previously thought to be exclusive to the aristocracy. [19] In turn, an era of revisionist historians sought to counter the exaggerations prevalent in Marxist interpretations. Modern historians such as Furet ushered in such change, shifting the bias of Revolutionary history from social interpretations of 1789 to political and linguistic interpretations, successfully revitalizing an old topic and refining its biases with renewed historical debate. [20] Claiming that “scholarship, though indispensable to the historian’s work, is not an end in itself,” French revisionist historian Francois Furet demonstrated that new historical writings depend upon and work off of the theses of the old when he referred back interpretations of the Revolution from the nineteenth century in order to develop his own works. [21] More distant from the Revolution in time than Tocqueville and yet referring back to his works when developing revisionist interpretations, Furet incorporated the benefits of nineteenth century works in their proximity to the events of 1789 while sieving out the biases of that proximity, ultimately creating a revisionist history which could be called fairly balanced. Although revisionist histories are the most modern interpretations of the Revolution, and have the most source material to work with, it is important to recognize how the Revolution’s 1989 bicentennial capitalized off of revisionist biases during an era of heightened nationalism. “At once a scholarly enterprise and a political statement, a slightly uneasy mixture of analysis and celebration,” the bicentennial once again opened the topic of the Revolution to alternate interpretations and debates from differing perspectives. [22] Nationalism of 1989, Republican principles of 1789, and the events of the Revolution were specifically interpreted for political purposes as the French administration at the time sought to identify themselves with the positive political legacy of the Revolution. [23] Just as with Taine in the Third Republic, applying historical legacy to validate political culture demonstrates stands as one typical reason as to why history would be interpreted, and thus written, in a biased fashion. Over the course of more than two centuries, the historiography of the French Revolution has been written by private individuals such as Taine, Staël, and Tocqueville; theorists such as Marx; and professional historians such as Jures, Mathiez, Lefebvre, Soboul, Cobban and Furet. Ultimately, these authors in the historiography of the Revolution fall on “the historiographical spectrum” according to their biases regarding the Terror. [24] This strategy, proposed by revisionist Peter Davies, points to the fact that there is usually a key event in the history of a given topic so contentious that its various interpretations can be used to expose the biases inherent in a historian’s writing. As those writing in the early nineteenth century treated the Terror with caution, ruling it an episode of chaos which detracted from the political glory of the Revolution, modern audiences can conclude that the biases in this interpretation stem from the era’s interest in Liberal politics and reverence for enlightenment ideals. As the writers of the marxist interpretation saw significant proletariat action in 1793, their bias towards class struggle and raising up the individual worker appears as a theme. With the Revisionists, particularly Furet, the Terror became the result of “the language and culture of 1789,” not that of war and counterrevolution, indicating an analysis through the lens of popular culture and politics rather than one of militant class struggle. [25] Producing history writing rife with various biases as they interpreted the events of 1789 and 1793, the works of those authors and historians who contributed to French Revolutionary historiography demonstrate that writing regarded as circumspect and balanced today may be considered biased again in the future. Therefore, it is possible to write histories more balanced than previously dominant narratives, but as balanced histories are still interpretations of history, they still contain selection bias as historians focus on or omit facts. Therefore, it is not possible to interpret history without also engineering biases which will inevitably come under scrutiny by future reviews of historical literature. It is only possible to create impartial history writing when one writes an account that includes all historical facts, and does not interpret those facts. But the reality is that even if someone were to find, pick up and read such a dusty tome, certain facts would stick and fade in their memory, as the first step in the process of history writing is simply remembering and reflecting on the past. And an interpretation would begin to form amongst their thoughts, and they would pick up a pen… Notes
There has been no shortage of evidence that the times we are currently living in are “historic.” The year 2020 opened with the impeachment of a president accused of soliciting foreign interference to aid his reelection campaign. This was quickly followed by a pandemic which has ground modern life to a halt, a compelling call for racial justice which demands the attention of all citizens, and one of the most contentious presidential elections in recent memory. 2021, not to be outdone by its predecessor, has begun with a low-budget coup attempt played out for all to see in real time in the media, followed swiftly by an historic second impeachment of President Trump. I’ve never empathized more with the refrain echoed across social media in the past year: “what I wouldn’t give to live in ‘precedented’ times again.”
Amidst all of this chaos, historians play a special role. Each of the aforementioned crises and the debates they have engendered stem from problems with deep historical roots; the voice of the historian has been critical in understanding and processing our current moment. It is not enough to simply absorb what is happening around us. In order to understand why public health directives have suddenly become a contentious part of contemporary discourse, one must begin with the push-and-pull dynamic between personal liberty and personal responsibility which has been at the heart of American civic life since at least the country’s establishment during the Revolution. In order to understand Black Lives Matter, one must grapple with the long history of white supremacy and racism still buried deep within the American soul. At the same time, the past year has also underscored the fact that predicting what historical knowledge is “useful” or “relevant” is impossible. At the start of 2020, historians researching topics like George Washington’s stance on smallpox inoculation, yellow fever in the Early Republic, or even the 1919 influenza epidemic, would have never expected that their research would hold such meaning to a wide public or that they would be pushed into such prominent positions as experts with reach beyond academia. Nor, I’m sure, would Joanne Freeman, a prominent historian of political culture at Yale, have predicted on the morning of January 6th, 2021 that by the end of the day it would be appropriate to write a modern epilogue to her most recent book-project, a study of violence in the halls of Congress before the Civil War. These types of examples are only some the most direct and obvious ways in which the study of history has become valuable. Looking beyond them, however, one is left with the fact that the discipline as a whole informs our sense of self. We must continue to study all kinds of history because the study of history is essential to the human experience. This blog is the James Blair Historical Review’s answer to the challenges, opportunities, and calls to action generated by recent events. It is our hope that the format of this blog will allow authors to move beyond the constraints of the traditional long form research essay to explore topics of historical interest in a variety of ways, whether through process pieces on what it means to study history, reviews of historical content, or short form narratives and analyses that expand our understanding of the past. As (aspiring) historians, we feel that the best way to contribute to the present is through enriching our understandings of the past. It is our hope that you, the reader, will find the content we publish to be both informative and entertaining. We look forward to beginning this new journey with you. We are all witnesses to the times we live in. And so, let us move forward, together, into a new period of reflection, learning, and understanding, not only of where we are today, but more importantly, of how we arrived at this moment in the first place. |
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April 2024
Above: "Bookstore (Taliaferro Hall) - Interior," 1994-06, Special Collections: University Archives Photo Collection.
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