As the result of a combination of a post of Chris’s and an excellent article in an old issue of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review that I read while in sunny California for a wobbly meeting recently, I’ve been thinking about history.
This article in ASR was called “How to find your local Wobbly history” by Robert Helms. The gist was this: go to a good library, preferably a university one. Get some books on the IWW. Look up your town in the index. Write down: dates, companies where agitation was happening, any names. Then go to the public library, look at old newspapers on microfiche, look for the day after the dates you wrote down previously. You will likely find detailed reports of events that know one alive knows about, including names of participants and addresses of events. Then go check out these addresses. Helms said he went to several old union hall sites, and two were still standing. In one, the current occupants had found some old handbills in the basement, and had them framed on the wall. Very cool stuff.
Anyway, it struck me after this stuff, and after a chat with Angelica about it, that in every class I can think of that I ever took (english, chemistry, physics, biology, various math, philosophy, arts, band, foreign languages) I was made to make or do some rudimentary component of an element stuided under the name of the subject matter. Not in history, though. That was just taking in and
occasionally spitting back ‘the facts’. I never got the sense that history was something one could ‘do’, or in fact that history is always something that people do and make and tell. Obviously there’s a host of lefty sounding reasons to cite for this, which are important. But the other thing is quite simply that the idea of making history (in the sense of producing histories, not in the sense of becoming famous, being world-historical) is really attractive and interesting to me. At some point I’d like to get back to work on the interview project some friends and I came up with, as part of a history of the present (not all that different from a type of journalism or something, maybe a lay sociology?), called “barely employed”, about those of us who have shitty jobs and have trouble making our ends meet - what gets called “precarity” in some circles, particularly some European ones.
I was just thinking about this, because I’m committed to doing only philosophy based on historical ‘facts’. In regard to the determination of these facts, I am thoroughly oriented towards a social scientific understanding of what history is - ever heard of Fernand Braudel?
Comment by mark — January 30, 2006 @ 9:14 am
That’s interesting Mark. Braudel’s on the infinite booklist, but I think I’m going to be less keen than you, due to some critical remarks I’ve read by Ranciere on him. As far as I can tell in my cursory reading Ranciere’s not a keen on social scientific historical facts. I’ll see if I can locate any e-copies of his relevant work. He spent several years training to be a labor historian, which carries rhetorical weight with me but I don’t know how to actually assess what he’s doing. He’s got a piece that impressed my lay judgement called “The myth of the artisan” attacking the politics of claims about artisan labor by French socialist historians, that might be of interest to you.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 30, 2006 @ 2:52 pm
Braudel’s good. I don’t know what Rancière says about him. But he’s hardly your typical empiricist.
Comment by Jon — January 31, 2006 @ 5:18 pm
Hi Nate,
I love this post. Great approach to wobbly history. History the academic discipline is indeed often taught as if its subject is a thing that happened rather than a method, a discipline, subject to constraints. That stuff often ends up in upper-year courses on historiography (the history and method of historical writing). I think this bifurcation is central to the sleight-of-hand in the discipline. But there are historians who don’t artificially divide their method and research from the events they study (which I think serves the defensive interests of professionalizing the discipline and rendering it beyond outside criticism).
I think university students are so programmed by this sleight-of-hand that they feel they are walking off the edge of a map when they learn of the contingencies and structures of historical writing itself.
There is so much phenomenal historical writing. I really like Carlo Ginzburg who often foregrounds his own sources as part of his narrative. If you can read French, check out Mohammed Harbi’s Une vie debout: memoire politique. He’s one of the best historians of Algeria, and was quite active himself in the Revolution. His memoir is a great mix of biographical, social and political (and empirical).
Comment by hollowentry — February 12, 2006 @ 1:37 am
Thanks Hollowentry, I appreciate it. Thanks for the recs as well.
I’ve got Ginzburg’s “The Judge and the Historian”, but haven’t read it yet. Chabert speaks highly of his Cheese and the Worms, and I take the Colonel’s recommendations very seriously. Can you recommend some other stuff, and some stuff on history writing (both thinking about it and practicing it)? I’m a total neophyte, but I’m very interested in all of this. There’s a few amateur historians in my IWW branch, one guy went up to a nearby mountain range to their local history center and came back with all kinds of cool union and working class history stuff, including photos of striking miners from 1914 - several of whom were clearly under 13. There’s also some great marching photos, people dressed up really well carrying banners, and lots of kids in the march too. Powerful stuff. It’s also good to know about in part as a corrective for people like myself who are excited by the EZLN, events in Argentina, Italy in the 70s, France in the late 60s, many of the reference points are to stuff that happened elsewhere which can lead to a sort of “if only I was from X other locale…”. Knowing about exciting events more close to home helps prevent that. Peter Linebaugh commented on this when he spoke at the IWW centenary last june - he said he went to Europe to find socialism, then in a reading group with Solidarity (UK) he met Feruccio Gambino who had stopped by on a trip from Italy to Detroit, where he was going to meet Martin Glaberman. Linebaugh said it was a big surprise to him that someone from Europe was looking to the US. That really resonated with me. Gotta run, I’m finishing cooking dinner.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 12, 2006 @ 1:52 am
on history writing (I’ll just mention academic stuff, but what you’re doing is great history):
Felix Gilbert, Varieties of History
-an old-school but excellent selection of historians on history.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History
-great historian.
EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
-It’s as much about challenging an the academic ‘enormous condescension of history’ vis a vis the working class as it is a landmark study of history from below. I still get goosebumps when reading some passages.
Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory.
-no sir, I don’t like it, but it’s an interesting intersection of academic public history and statecraft.
Derrida.
Marx.
Samir Amin.
Zinn.
Anything that reveals something true about people and society.
The rabbit hole with historiography is that each text on historical writing, is itself located among other historical events, as well as the institional structures of the academy. But then, acknowledging and examining these historical connections to academic production is just good history…
Comment by hollowentry — February 14, 2006 @ 5:36 pm
Thanks Hollowentry. Thompson’s been on my list for a really long time. That book’s just so long, though, it’s intimidating. As for Marx, I spent several years on my own where I tried to read v1 of Capital. I was put off by the early sections, and by the aura of majesty around that book. I think I started 4 or 5 times and never got beyond 100 pages if that. I finally got the advice to read the ending first and that did the trick. What struck me was all the history in the book, and how much he’s really quoting from many other sources. (It makes me wonder at the common academic treatment of Marx, to emphasize terms and problems from the very beginning of the book and leave most of the rest.) Some of his descriptions of the ‘bloody legislation’ made me talk out loud while reading it, “oh my god…” and the like.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 14, 2006 @ 7:24 pm
Hey there,
As an aspiring “amateur” historian myself (a full year into the research I have yet to even begin actually writing anything about STO), and an old acquaintance of Bob Helms, I liked this post. I especially liked the anecdote from Linebaugh, and it makes me think that there is a general tendency in the left to look more carefully at the experiences and lessons of revolutionaries in other places (and times) than in our own communities. I’m not sure this is a bad thing either; the perspective gained may more than compensate for the lack of applicability. In this vein, I spend more time thinking about STO than I do about any currently existing revolutionary group, and I know significantly more about anarchism in Venezuela than I do about anarchism here in Chicago. At the same time, this stuff can devolve into a total waste of time. An ex-STO’er said offered this self-criticism during an interview: “We were experts on Iran, but knew nothing about Cleveland!”
Anyway, two of my favorite history books:
P. Novick, That Noble Dream (a history of the history profession in the US, viewed through the critical lens of “the objectivity question”)
W. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (a fantastic assessment of the relationship between Chicago’s development during the 19th century and its environmental surroundings)
Still liking your blog…
Solidarity,
Mike
Comment by Mike — March 17, 2006 @ 10:06 pm
wow i was looking on the internet to write an essayon ‘what historians do’ and i read all yr thoughts and comments it really inpired me.
Comment by Noelle — September 26, 2006 @ 5:33 pm
Cool. Thanks.
Comment by Nate — September 27, 2006 @ 1:18 pm
This is really weird. This post is from about 2 years ago and yet it’s now on the top of the blog in 2008. Strange.
Comment by Nate — June 16, 2008 @ 5:40 pm