Lecture 1a – History As Narrative

Deriving from the same Greek word from which “story” derives, history is indeed a story and
the craft of history requires the ability to tell a good story. Four fundamental plots have predominated
historical storytelling. (1) The deterministic sees the present as the predetermined outcome of the past,
wherein the present could not have turned out any other way. (2) The providential sees history as the
unfolding of a planned design, God being the primary planner although nature occasionally gets a nod.
(3) The tragic sees the world as the outcome of human error, attributable to inherent defects of human
nature. (4) The ironic sees the present, on the one hand, as the unintended or unforeseen result of past
actions or, on the other, as a paradox, a set of contradictions which may or may not be overcome.
Different groups of Americans, and different historians, have applied each of these perspectives to
American history. The providential dominated among historians until the late nineteenth century, when
Marxist and environmental determinism supplanted it. The significance of the deterministic and
providential is that they perceive history as patterned. The study of history is thus a search for and
“discovery” of patterns. That quest becomes problematical. Are the “discovered” patterns actual or
artificial/induced, a Procrustean bed (as described in an ancient Greek myth)?.
Recently, the tragic and ironic have captured the profession of history. The tragic allows for both
correction, the recognition and overcoming of faults (learning from one’s mistakes), and acts of heroism,
personal struggle in the face of (oftentimes insuperable) obstacles. The ironic is more cynical, for it holds
that corrections are either incomplete or subject to random, and uncontrollable, occurrences which cannot
be anticipated by fallible humans (“the unfolding of the unforeseen”).
This course will examine the interplay of tragedy and irony. To offer two brief examples of
irony, let’s look at Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the acknowledged “fathers” of American
democracy. Jefferson, the champion of human liberty, kept slaves. His most famous slave was Sally
Hemings, Even though Sally Hemings had three European-descent grandparents, her mother was a
slave, a condition that, according to Virginia law, passed from mother to children. Sally Hemings was,
in fact, the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, nee Martha Wayles. When Jefferson married Martha, his third
cousin, she brought into their marriage dozens of her slaves, incuding one Betty Hemings and Betty’s
ten children, six of them, including the youngest named Sally, sired by Martha’s father. As Martha
Jefferson lay on her deathbed, she asked Thomas to promise that he would never marry again. Jefferson
fulfilled his vow—in part. Jefferson entered into a relationship with Sally Hemings, a liaison that lasted
for thirty-nine years, from 1787 to 1826, but he never married her. Did the length of that relationship
make Sally Hemings his mistress or common-law wife? Hemings, 30 years younger than Jefferson,
joined him in France when she was 14 years old. Before she agreed to have intercourse with him, she
made an arrangement that if he agreed to emancipate any children they might have (they had six
children over the years), she would return to the United Sates with him as his slave. Their first child
was born when she was sixteen. When his political enemies made public his affair in 1802, Jefferson
refused to respond to the charges, which did not hurt his reelection as President in 1804. Jefferson did
free Sally Hemings’ children.
Andrew Jackson’s reputation was built, in large part, on his being the fiercest of Indian-
fighters. Yet on one occasion Jackson added to his dozen or more adopted children a Creek (an Indian
nation centered in Alabama and Georgia) infant he found in his dying mother’s arms and whose
father he had just killed in battle. What overcame his hatred? The defining moment in Jackson’s early
life was being orphaned when he was thirteen years old. These brief tales of personal contradiction
reflect very modestly on the two greatest American contradictions (and tragedies): slavery in the land
of liberty and genocide in a land of equality. And they make for compelling stories.
Lecture 1b – America and the Past (Escapable or Inescapable)

Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer 1782 [1778]

Crevecoeur fought with the French army during the French and Indian War (1754-1763).
After the Treaty of Paris (1763) Crevecoeur left the French army, settled in New York, married a
woman of English descent, and became a successful farmer.
Letter #3 poses the question: “What then is the American, this new man?” The conclusion of
the letters answers as follows: “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient
prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new
government he obeys and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the
broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here the individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of
men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. The American is a
new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new
opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to
toils of a very different sort, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.”

Andrew Jackson
“[Americans] trample on their forefathers’ graves in the rush to self-advancement.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)

Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who made an extended visit to the United States in 1831-
1832, published his views of the United States in the most famous and enduring study of this country
by a foreign observer. Among his many observations are the following:
“In America no one cares for what occurred before his time.”
“In the United States, a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it
before the roof is on. . . . he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. . . .
he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable belongings
elsewhere. . . . the tie that unites one generation to another is relaxed or broken. . . . every man there
loses all trace of the ideas of his forefathers or takes no heed of them.” The factors accounting for the
‘strange unrest’ of Americans are (1) “the taste for physical gratifications,” (2) a social condition in
which “neither laws nor customs retain any person in his place,” and (3) a pervasive belief that “all
professions are open to all, and a man’s own energies may place him at the top of any one of them.”

Henry Ford
“History is Bunk.”

James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (1985)

“History . . . is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even
principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it
within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that
we do. . . . And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror
one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is and formed one’s point of view. In
great pain and terror because, therefore, one enters into battle with that historical creation, oneself.”