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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Stan Katz

History Matters

I have been working for the past several years with a group of historians who are trying to create a National History Center in the nation’s capital. This is an idea proposed many years ago by J. Franklin Jameson when he was the Librarian of Congress, and resurrected by my former Princeton colleague James Banner several years ago. The distinguished University of Texas historian Roger Louis, adopted the idea as his own when he was elected the president of the American Historical Association. The goal is to create a separate organization, closely affiliated to the AHA through an interlocking board of trustees, that can undertake a variety of roles related to promoting the importance of history in American and international public life.

Toward that end the NHC has undertaken a fund-raising campaign among the membership of the AHA, and has collected sufficient funds to raise its flag and initiate its first programs. Among them have been summer seminars for community-college history teachers, exploration of issues relating to history policy (state and federal history programs), a publication series on historiography with the Oxford University Press, and Congressional briefings on the historical understanding of contemporary public-policy issues. The underlying ideas are both that historians have obligations to the public that extend beyond ordinary teaching and research, and that if the public is to support the work that historians do, it must understand better what it is that professional historians do.

One of the most promising activities of the new center has been the inauguration of a series of talks on the history of foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. Last night I attended the second session at the CFR, a brilliant presentation by the Columbia University historian Fritz Stern on why the Nazis rose so quickly to power in Germany in the 1930s. Stern pointed to the long, failed political education of the German people, the failures of leadership on the part of the German ruling class and other specific reasons for the (nonelectoral) transfer of power to Hitler, but he focused on the manipulation by the Nazis of national-security issues to consolidate their power — fear of the enemy within (the Jews) was manipulated to devastating effect. This produced, according to Stern, a “silent and jubilant submission” of the German people.

There was a long and spirited discussion following the talk, in which it became clear that the audience was making connections between the dangers and failures of the 1930s and those of the contemporary world. When asked what he most feared today, Stern replied “the Singapore model” — authoritarianism and economic development. Which of course is one way to describe the Nazi experiment.

History matters.

Posted at 04:50:44 PM on March 5, 2008 | All postings by Stan Katz

Comments

  1. You’re right, of course. History matters because experience matters.

    I hope you won’t be shocked to find that a literary critic agrees with you, but, in fact, the urgency of your argument is also that of our work in literature, whether we are reading Herodotus, that old soldier Aeschylus, Spenser, Shakespeare, or—and there are great Texans—Larry McMurtry or Horton Foote.

    We do a marvelous job of teaching our students that there is fog, but perhaps we should also mention that in the fog there are some solid objects.

    Must we wait for archaeologists to discover our common concern?

    Best wishes.

    — R. W. Haynes · Mar 6, 07:07 AM · #

  2. Absolutely, as Mr. Haynes says, history matters because experience matters. But, to make the connection current, it is important to point out that what kind of experience it is also matters. Senator Clinton prides herself on having more “experience” than Senator Obama in foreign policy, so that we can trust her to make the right decision when that call comes at 3 am. But to judge by what she has said and by the record of what the Clinton Administration did (with which she associates herself), her “experience” with Latin America, for example, does not inspire confidence. In her most recent foreign policy speech on February 26, she lumped Hugo Chavez with the leaders of Iran and North Korea as all dictators despite the fact that Chavez was re-elected with over 60% of the popular vote the last time an election was held in Venezuela. She appears not to understand the meaning of democracy or the nature of change in Latin America after the failure of the Washington Consensus neoliberal policies that the Clinton Administration supported. Would you want her making the decision if the conflict between Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela were to boil over into a major national security crisis? I wouldn’t.

    — Sandy · Mar 7, 07:33 AM · #

  3. What is the most important function of a National History Center is the continued recording of history as accurately as possible. There will be disagreements about current affairs and policy, but the record must still be written. As it grows, it may be changed over time as new discoveries are made – this is, after all, the process of writing history. However politicized the first draft may be, this record must exist in the first place for historians to have a baseline from which to work from. Yes it is a shame that recent political influences have tainted our historical record, but isn’t this really part of a larger process of diminishing education, something that affects all academic disciplines, from science to biology and, yes, also history? The NHC can be an asset in combating the trend, provided it is maintained as dynamically as possible to allow it to be what we historians understand history to be. It’s greatest danger is not in becoming politicized, an inevitable reality of writing history, but in becoming static.

    — Michael Koetsier · Mar 7, 12:48 PM · #

  4. In addition to some of the good points made above, another value of studying history is having a context for thinking about transformative moments. When I was caught in the coup attempt in Russia in 1991—right outside our window— I watched “history” happening on the ground; my husband, then U.S. Ambassador, had to make decisions based on unknown outcomes. We both relied on knowing history for thinking about and interpreting the present moment – and the transformation that followed it. (I also felt compelled to provide material for future historians, and wrote a book, “Through Dark Days & White Nights: Four Decades Obsesrving a Changing Russia.”) We also saw not only the actions and choices of individuals (from Presidents and Ambassadors down), but also the role of serendipity, the most charming muse of history. Yes, history matters – a lot.

    — Naomi F. Collins, Ph.D. · Mar 7, 04:28 PM · #

  5. pardon my ignorance but I thought the Iraq war was a pretty good national history center—you soak up excess billions per month, humiliate everyone in the US, spawn hordes of new terrorists, and condemn the republican party to a decade of petty shrinkage (with grinches and gingriches hoping by stepping over sanctified bad marriages to leap to power). You demonstrate that ignorance of history is self-correcting—those who ignore it become it. Divine justice. People are always their own best revenge.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 10, 10:31 AM · #

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