High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
Introduction
W
e hope this is not simply a one-time collection of excellent
The Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History
will grow into a biannual publication with submissions from across the nation. The intellectual isolation of undergraduate history students from their peers is troubling. We hopethat this
Journal
will help make the study of history a more collective,shared endeavor. To solicit manuscripts, the editors asked professors to nominateoutstanding papers to be considered for publication in the journal. All the nominated papers are posted on our website, as we believe
of historical scholarship. From the many nominated papers, we haveselected six which we believe are worth special notice because of theextent of their research, the precision, nuance, and persuasiveness of their arguments, and the grace and elegance of their prose. Of theselected authors, three have also been awarded prizes and invited topresent their papers at the Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History Conference. Born in Brooklyn in 1915, Herbert Aptheker earned bothhis bachelor’s degree and his doctorate at Columbia University.Hisdoctoral dissertation was later published in 1943 as
American NegroSlave Revolts,
and is a seminal work on slave resistance, undermining the dominant narratives of slavery as a benign institution and slavesas docile subordinates.As Columbia undergraduates ourselves, we areproud to honor Aptheker’s example of thorough research and boldreinterpretation that challenges the assumptions and prejudices of thestatus quo.In selecting articles to be published, the editors came up againstthe question: what is history? History is not just “one damn thing afteranother,” as H.A.L. Fisher quipped. The Popperian assertion that allstructures, categories, and solidarities are imposed upon history by thehistorian is as misguided as the idea that history can be turned outby cranking the mechanical handle of the correct “Theory,” whether
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
- Bertholt Brecht
Whig, liberal, post-modern, or Marxian. We hope that the articles we
methods, and techniques of historical inquiry. The maintenance of order, the process of change, the making of structures, and the imposition of power are at the core of historicalinquiry. Jean Paul Sartre wrote that “history is not order. It is disorder;a rational disorder.At the very moment when it maintains order, i.e.structure, history is already on the way to undoing it.”
1
Despite the wishes of those who want “real” patriotic history, or just the plain,simple truth, change is constitutive to the practice of history, both in the world as it was and in the way the past is constantly being reinterpretedby new generations of historians. As the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote in the fourteenth century:
History is the record of human society... of revolutions and uprisingsby one set of people against another, with the resulting kingdoms andstates with their various ranks; of the different activities and occupationsof men, whether for gaining their livelihood or in various sciences andcrafts; and in general, of all the transformations that society undergoesby its very nature.
2
History, it seems, has fallen out of favor with current intellectualfashions. Students are more interested in “Theory” and the variousiterations of “post-,” be it modern, structuralist, Freudian, Marxist,or colonial, than in the mundane drudgery of empirical research andconcentrated close reading. History’s dedication to providing real,meaningful knowledge seems quaint to those who delight in pointing out that sources are misleading and biased, our selection of evidenceis necessarily incomplete, and our perspective skewed by dominantdiscourses and ideologies. These forces, long acknowledged by historians, are used to discredit the project of historical scholarshipaltogether. History, we are sure, has an important place. While allresearch is necessarily informed by theory, and inter-disciplinary work and the post-modern turn have made contributions, as a publication we hope to encourage and reward scholarship that is solidly groundedin the empirical core of critical, interpretative historical research. Asserting the importance of history beyond the walls of the academy
1
“Sartre Aujuord’hui,”
l’Arc
, no. 30, trans. in
Telos
, 9 (1971), 110-116.
2
Quoted in,
Past and Present
1(1952): i.
iv
COLUMBIAUNDERGRADUATEJOURNALOFHISTORY
is particularly needed at this moment, especially in the United States. A faith in progress, in the inevitable growth of abundance, happiness,and justice, is at the core of American national identity. This faith of a people on a hill untouched by the sins of the past or weighted downby the burden of history has disastrous and destructive consequences.
Toynbee wrote that “there is, of course, a thing called history, buthistory is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We arecomfortably outside all that.”
3
And so it continues with the UnitedStates, the world’s new hegemon. As Rashid Khalidi observes in
Resurrecting Empire
, the widespread belief that a Western power wascapable of not simply insisting regime change but of administering the “democratization” of a major Middle Eastern country required asealed vacuum which the realities of history could not contaminate.
4
History should not be a set of policy prescriptions for one of themajor parties, nor should we imagine that the historian could or shouldbe an isolated, objective, de-personalized and de-socialized instrument
absolute laws of historical determination, nor is it a series of random,unpredictable, and utterly contingent happenings. History is a narrativeof choices made under pressing, constraining circumstances, asindividuals struggle singly and collectively to survive, sustain, remake,overturn, or revolutionize the society in which they live. The British historian E.P. Thompson writes that “meaning canonly be given to history in the quarrel between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ - wemust thrust the ‘ought’ of choice into the ‘is’ of circumstance.” Humannature, for Thompson, is crucial to history, because it is both what we “make history with,” and what history makes of us. Thompsonreminds us that
human nature is potentially revolutionary; man’s will is not a passive
(or the hitherto prevailing limitations of ‘human nature’) and on that
3
Quoted in C. Vann Woodward, “The Irony of Southern History”
The Journal of Southern History
19, no. 1 (1953): 4-5.
4
Rashid Khalidi, “The Perils of Ignoring History” in
Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East
(Boston: BeaconPress, 2004), v-xvi.INTRODUCTION
v
Add a Comment