By Daniel Falcone
The following are some notes on recent works of revisionist history and historiography: (great resources for any teacher of history)
James Banner’s The Ever-Changing Past
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything
John Ernest’s Liberation Historiography
Judith Bennett’s History Matters
Banner:
- Marxism was another example of transformative revisionism
- Philosophical revisionism concerns the purposes and uses of historical inquiry
- Evidence based revisionism and Method driven revisionism
- “In this rough informal typology of revisionism there must in the end be a place for what can only be termed normal revisionism, adjustments to previously held approaches to our interpretations of historical subjects that alter our understanding of them.”
Graeber:
Distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies:
· The only thing we can reasonably infer about social organization among our earliest ancestors is that it's likely to have been extraordinarily diverse
· The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich
· European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory
· The concept of social stratification 30,000 years ago
· Institutional flexibility brought the capacity to step outside the boundaries of a given structure and reflect
· What makes us human in the first place is our capacity as moral and social beings to negotiate between such alternatives (re: Hobbes and Rousseau)
· The ethnographic record is important
· Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging people really were living in a State of Nature
· To say that foragers settled in territories that lend themselves well to foraging is a silly argument
· We can now put a final nail in the coffin of the prevailing view that human beings lived more or less like Kalahari Bushmen until the invention of agriculture sent everything askew
· It is not unusual for ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonian societies to discover that almost everything around them has an owner
· If private property has an origin it is as old as the idea of the sacred which is likely as old as humanity itself
Ernest argued in Liberation Historiography that African American history sees the subjectivity question arriving much sooner, in contrast to Novick’s chronology. Without a robust archive and a limited survey of primary data, nineteenth century African American history relied upon speeches, narratives, autobiography, and other sources of literature.[1] The production of later history according to Ernest is seen in the celebration of contemporary achievements in the recent past or present.
His work is not just important in terms of the historiographical record but reveals how the study of memory outside of the Rankean tradition uses memory and commemoration to arrive at objectivity, not depart from it. That is to say “white history” starts with objectivity and later explores subjectivity, while “black history” starts with subjectivity and seeks objectivity.
[1] John, Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Bennett:
- thinking about the past > than speculating on the future
- argument around medieval history in the history of feminist history writing in the last 30 years
- how to do the past < doing the future
- the feminism of feminist history
- universities are feminist battlegrounds
- historians of women and gender away focus more on internal academic issues
- integrate women's experiences into mainstream history
- hire more women faculty
- ensure that our campuses speak to the interest of all students
- first to eradicate the misogynist traditions of academia in their many entrenched forms
- second to understand women's oppression and work towards its final eradication
- we must look further back at end continuity as well as change and take better advantage of the perspectives that only temporal distance can offer
- must not essentialize women in history but confront patriarchy outright