Not Your (Old, White) Father’s History

If you haven’t already heard, the New York Times recently interviewed retired Princeton historian of the Civil War James McPherson for the newspaper’s “By the Book” feature. McPherson is a well-respected legend in the field, yet many historians were left scratching their collective heads over his responses to such questions as “Who are the best historians writing today?” and “What are the best books about African American history?” Suffice it to say, his answers seemed very white, very male, and well, very dated.

Since the Times published the piece, historians have had a field day offering up their own suggestions on Twitter and Facebook. Blogger extraordinaire, Historiann even issued a challenge to all historians to answer the same questions that the NYT asked McPherson and publish it under the hashtag #HistoriannChallenge.  Several folks have since risen to the challenge and you can check out The Daily History for a nice roundup of responses.

We here at Nursing Clio want to join in on the historical party. Since McPherson’s answers seemed so anchored in past scholarship, we thought it important to ask three of our bloggers who are also current graduate students to participate in this thought experiment:

• Austin C. McCoy is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Michigan. His research interests include post-World War II US political and urban history. He is working on a dissertation analyzing how left urban populists addressed economic crisis in rustbelt cities during the 1970s and 1980s.

• Sarah Handley-Cousins is a PhD candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she is currently hard at work on a dissertation about the lives of disabled and troubled Union Civil War veterans.

• Jacqueline Antonovich is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include post-1865 US history, history of the American family, and history of medicine. Her dissertation focuses on the circulation of medical knowledge among women doctors in the American West, and their influence on politics and public health policy from 1870-1930.

What books are currently on your nightstand?

Austin: 

Ava Baron’s Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor and Edward Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. I am reading Baron’s edited collection because I am a novice labor historian by accident. While I am a historian of 20^th century U.S. politics, I like to keep up with the latest scholarship on slavery and African Americans in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Sarah:

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot; The Captive Heart by Dale Cramer; the Bible.

Jacqueline:

Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism has been on my nightstand since, like, 2011. I’ve used it so much over the past four years that it doesn’t make sense to shelve it. Also, I think it makes more sense nowadays to ask people what is currently on “digital bookshelf,” AKA, their E-reader. In my case, it’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Austin: 

Michael C. Dawson’s Blacks In and Out of the Left. It is a great book analyzing African Americans’ relationship with the Left in the U.S. in the twentieth century. Dawson reminds readers of the crucial roles that African Americans played in developing American radicalism. He also properly refutes the dominant (mostly white male) interpretation of the decline of the Left that blames women and people of color for practicing “identity politics” instead of a leftist “universal” class politics.

Sarah:

This is so hard! The last work of history that I read that resonated with me, and that affected the way that I write and teach, was Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. It’s an incredible book that draws important connections between issues of nationalism, gender, and race, and I think, challenges the way that historians have considered the Confederacy.

Jacqueline:

I’m going to cheat a bit and answer with an article rather than a book. Catherine Kudlick’s “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other'” is a must-read essay for every historian, scholar, and school teacher. Kudlick argues that disability history is invaluable to scholars in terms of understanding how Western cultures build hierarchies, maintain social order, and define progress.

Who are the best historians writing today?

Austin: 

I’m attracted to innovative historians. Robin Kelley, Mae Ngai, Barbara Ransby, Johanna Fernandez, Marisa Chappel, Matthew Countryman, Nathan Connolly, Matthew Lassiter, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Khalil G. Muhammad, Heather Ann Thompson, Steven Hahn, Tiya Miles, and Alice Kessler-Harris. All of them have inspired my scholarship and forced me to rethink assumptions governing their subfields.

Sarah:

I love the work of Megan Kate Nelson, Drew Gilpin Faust, Thavolia Glymph, Kathleen Brown, Eric Foner, and Jill Lepore – among many, many others.

Jacqueline:

Like Austin, I really get excited about historians who are using innovative approaches to their scholarship. Tiya Miles comes to mind. The way she weaves together narrative, public history, and traditional scholarship is fantastic. Also Kate Brown. Especially her new book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. For history of health and medicine – Conevery Bolton Valenčius, Sharla Fett, Alondra Nelson, Leslie Reagan, Janet Golden, Barron Lerner, and many more.

And what are the best books about African American history?

Austin: 

I still like Manning Marable’s Race, Reform and Rebellion and Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America as general histories. I cannot read Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration and Tera Hunter’s To Joy My Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labor After the Civil War enough. Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, is one of my favorite works of civil rights history. It is one of the few works in the field that contributes greatly to our understanding of the movement and provides applicable insights about political organizing. Khalil G. Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America is one of the best pieces of African American history to come out in the last several years.

Sarah:

Within the field of Civil War Era Studies, anyway, there is some fascinating new work coming out that complicates our assumptions about life for freed people after emancipation. My advisor, Carole Emberton, has written a powerful book about the post-emancipation South, Beyond Redemption: Race and Violence in the American South after the Civil War. Jim Downs has also reconsidered life after emancipation by looking at the health of freed slaves, and the various ways that the state failed them in Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Jacqueline:

So many great books out there – Out of the House of Bondage by Thavolia Glymph, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty by Annelise Orleck, At The Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire, and The Lost Promise of Civil Rights by Risa Goluboff. From a history of medicine perspective, Sharla Fett’s Working Cures and Marie Jenkins Schwartz’s Birthing a Slave are fantastic. Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination and The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by Jonathan M. Metzl are two books that I would single out as great examples of more recent African American/medical history.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

Austin: 

I only remember reading a lot of encyclopedias. The “W’s” were my favorite because, believe it or not, I liked reading about the two world wars. This is funny considering that I am far from a military historian. I am also as anti-war as they come.

Sarah:

I read just about anything I could get my hands on. Much of my love of history, and my love of reading, came from the books my father read to me as a child, especially the Little House on the Prairie books. When I was about 11, my Dad gave me his copy of John Jakes’ North and South, which I read on the playground, and a few years later, I devoured his copy of The Killer Angels. I also loved the American Girl books. But I read more than just history – I loved dorky books like the Babysitters Club and Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. I loved A Wrinkle in Time, Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and anything by Stephen King, John Grisham or Michael Crichton. I remember loving Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I loved Shakespeare. My favorite books of all time are all books that I read as a teenager: Little Women, Jane Eyre, and Rebecca.

Jacqueline:

I was a voracious reader. I loved to read since as far back as I can remember. I’d like to tell you that I read all the Little House books, Jane Austen, and Little Women, but that would be a total lie. I loved mysteries, sci-fi, and anything paranormal. When I was younger, I would read anything and everything by Lois Duncan, then I graduated to Stephen King. Eventually I fell in love with dystopian works like Brave New World, 1984, and Farenheit 451.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are what would it be?

Austin: 

That’s impossible. Malcolm X’s and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters all challenged my thinking and taught me something about political organizing, the meaning of what it means to be black, and the practice of history.

Sarah:

I don’t think any book sums up how I came to be a female Civil War historian who looks closely at gender more than LeeAnn Whites’ The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890. I read it when I was working on an undergraduate thesis that dealt with masculinity during the Civil War. I had recently struggled to convince fellow students in a Civil War program that gender was a worthwhile mode of analysis for soldiers, and I just remember thinking, “this is it, this is what I was looking for!” as I read her introduction.

If I took it even further back, it actually was James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom that entered me into the world of Civil War scholarship. I had never even considered becoming a historian until I found myself reading McPherson in college for a Civil War seminar. I had question after question scribbled in the margins, and I wanted to know more. It was while I was reading that book that I started thinking about ways that I could keep studying American history.

Jacqueline:

This is a weird question. I guess I would have to say Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. I read this book for the first time while I was researching and writing my senior thesis as an undergraduate in Colorado. I think hers was the first academic history that I read that made me a) fall in love with history and b) realize that there is important and relevant work being done in history that has nothing to do with great men doing great things. I guess I could blame Smith-Rosenberg for my decision to go to grad school. It’s all her fault, really.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Austin: 

I would not be surprised if the president has read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander already. So I choose Angela Y. Davis’s The Meaning of Freedom: and Other Difficult Dialogues. It is a great collection of speeches on racism, sexism, crime, the national security state, and corporate capitalism. It is very relevant in light of the Ferguson protests and the roll back of voting rights.

Sarah:

This is tough. I think regardless of who the president was at the moment, I would want them to read Joanna Schoen’s Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare; Leslie Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973;, Kim Neilson’s A Disability History of the United States, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Jacqueline:

Hmm..this is tough. I wish I could require him to read all of my prelims books on the history of American imperialism. If I had to pick one it would probably be Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 by Matthew Frye Jacobson. He examines American imperialism and immigration policy through the collision of racism, market imperatives, and idealizations of a republican government.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three are invited?

Austin: 

I do not read much literature. That means Toni Cade Bambara would be invited, for sure. I would invite Howard Zinn and Robin Kelley as well. It would be an inspiring party.

Sarah:

If I’m allowed to invite writers who are no longer living, I would invite Louisa May Alcott, Maya Angelou, and Walt Whitman. If I had to choose living writers, it would be Drew Gilpin Faust, J. K. Rowling, and Stephen King. (My, that would be an interesting dinner party …)

Jacqueline:

I would like to host a feminist dinner party instead and invite way more than three people. I would invite Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, bell hooks, Gayle Rubin, Dolores Huerta, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and all the Nursing Clio bloggers. Can you imagine how fantastic that would be?

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

Austin: 

Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class is a vexing text. His initial discussion of the multiracial rank-and-file rebellion of the early 1970s is really insightful. The rest is a lamentation of the “disappearance of class” obscures the ways in which people of color, ex-New Left activists in cities like Cleveland and Detroit, and labor feminists revised and articulated class politics. I always thought the subtitle of Cowie’s book should have read: “The 1970s and the Last Days of the White Male Working Class.”

Sarah:

There was recently a book by military historian Michael C. C. Adams called Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War. I had heard a lot about it, looked forward to it, and actually bought it instead of waiting to get it from the library. As a historian that focuses on the ‘dark side’ of the Civil War, I expected a careful and deep investigation of ‘dark history,’ or the horrors of war, what I got was fairly boring and routine. The book was largely compiled from other historians’ research, lumped into chapters that simply retold shocking or disturbing stories without analysis or interpretation. It got fairly good reviews from Civil War historians, but for anyone who has read extensively in the historiography of the horrors of this war, this book offers nothing new.

The last book that I failed to finish was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. I got it for Christmas, I had to at least try. I firmly believe that no one actually read that book – they just carried it around to make it look like they read thick history books.

Jacqueline:

Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America by E. Richard Brown. I mean, it makes some very important points and it is a must read if you are a historian of medicine, but some portions of his argument haven’t aged well. To me, it is an example of relying too much on theory (in this case, Marxist theory) as the driving engine behind a historical argument.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

 Austin: 

I have not read E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. I need to read all of the classics in labor history.

Sarah:

I’ve never actually read Bruce Catton’s The Civil War … which like, everyone who studies the Civil War has read. Oops. I’m also ashamed to admit I’ve never read a single thing by William Faulkner. I’m going to Amazon at this moment – I’ll start reading immediately.

Jacqueline:

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler. I’ve read many, many excerpts of this particular book, but never the whole thing, cover-to-cover. A little bit of Judith goes a long way. Have I just lost all credibility?

What do you plan to read next?

Austin: 

I will either read Betty Medsger’s The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI or Jeffrey Haas’s The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. I am patiently waiting for Johanna Fernandez to publish her book on the Young Lords.

Sarah:

James Marten’s America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace. It’s a close look at a disabled Civil War veteran who was very well known during the 19^th century, but pretty much entirely forgotten today. His story captures some of the larger stories about disabled Union veterans in the post Civil War North, and I look forward to getting some time to read it.

Jacki:

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots by Brenda Stevenson. This question just reminded me that I’ve been meaning to order it.

Now it is your turn, Nursing Clio readers. How would you respond to the #HistoriannChallenge? Answer in the comments section!