Telling the American Story
Owen Bowden argues that postwar American "Whig" historiography is not suited to the emerging postliberal moment and that American historians need to go back to basics.
Political and ideological processes shape historical understanding. We are witnessing a quiet shift in how Americans think about their country’s history, in both popular and academic discourse, due to political and ideological shifts in the society at large. As a student of history in college, I was taught to think about the concept of historiography, and its development, as the history of how people wrote and think about a particular history over time. As an historian, one should have a strong grasp about how one’s work will contribute to the relevant and existing historiography of one’s focus. In other words, it is incumbent on the historian to ask himself: Why is it that historians in certain places and times interpreted historical events and epochs in distinctive ways? To what extent does the available documentation available in one’s own time validate or invalidate a historiography’s way of thinking? And what caused the historiography to shift in ways of thinking about a certain place, period, and/or person? The answer to these questions, in short, is due to political nature of doing history. How a people of a certain time and place think and write about history is not solely a matter pertaining to the availability of sources but is largely determined by the prevailing values of their time, the political system under which they grew up and lived—as well as shifts between and within systems—and the extent to which that political system permits for an investigation into certain histories.
Let’s take, as an example, the historiography of the Soviet Union. For most of the Soviet Union’s lifespan, Arup Banerji shows, “history and historiography remained subject to specific restrictive constraints.” This is because the Soviet government controlled research institutions, publications, and themes to ensure that historical research did not manifest into output which contradicted the values and historical interpretations that the regime had popularized and officialized as the basis of its historical and political legitimacy. This means that the majority of Soviet historians were prevented from discussions with foreign historians, engaging with foreign publications, and being aware of western debates in relation to their own history. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s “openness” reforms later swept the USSR, how Soviet historians began speaking and writing about their history, particularly of the Stalinist era, changed accordingly. No longer were Soviet historians so fearful about presenting documentation which showcased the extent of Lenin’s or Stalin’s repression and the consequences of their policies, such as War Communism or collectivization. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent opening of the archives to historians from all over the world, revealed decades’ worth of information of secret arrests, disappearances, mass death, and other hidden crimes. This, nonetheless, is not to deny that western historiography of the Soviet Union during the Cold War was not heavily slanted with over-exaggeration with regards to the excesses of the Soviet regime, as history was used as part of the broader ideological struggle to mobilize western populations behind their governments; which partly explains why certain influential Cold War policy hawks, such as Richard Pipes, also wrote histories of the Soviet Union. Today there are growing murmurs that we need to take another look at the historiography surrounding the Second World War.
