History Without Tears

The historian H.W. Brands, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, has a Substack that listeners to the History of the Americans Podcast might enjoy. The immensely prolific Professor Brands — 30 or so books and counting — writes a couple of times a week on moments in American history, and without the throat-clearing conclusory statements or unreconstructed anti-Americanism so common in American history today.

See, for example, this piece, “History without tears….“. Regular listeners won’t be even slightly surprised to learn that I liked this bit quite a lot:

In the academic world it became fashionable to identify with the downtrodden and marginalized—the losers of history, essentially—and the practice has persisted since.

One result is an admirable expansion of our knowledge of the past. Another is the impression, common among readers of works by academics, that history is a sordid tale of unrelieved oppression by the powerful—typically Western, white, male and straight—against everyone else. Because the writers of these histories tend to identify, if only vicariously, with the oppressed, the histories often point a stern finger of blame at history’s “winners.”

This would be fine if the blame were kept in perspective. The powerful indeed have much to answer for. But they often have much to be credited for, too. Caesar subdued the Gauls but the Romans brought peace and order to their world. English imperialists wreaked havoc on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, but they also laid the foundation of the United States, where many of the critics live and thrive. The Declaration of Independence left slaves in bondage, but the same declaration made possible the first governments—those of the Northern states—in the world to emancipate slaves. The robber barons were grasping and ruthless, but the universities they endowed have advanced human knowledge, bettered human health—and provided cushy jobs for many of the robber barons’ critics.

Cushy jobs! That might irritate a few adjunct faculty struggling to make a name for themselves, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. Good history doesn’t pander to an audience, and propagandistic history — whether aggrandizing a nation’s past or pointedly deploying it in the service of some claimed “social justice” objective — is never good history, even if many people love to read history they will agree with.

When Professor Brands writes that “history without tears” — the bad stuff — wouldn’t be very interesting, he is absolutely correct. I suggest, however, that “history without tears” also might mean something else: A posture toward history that does not demand that we wring our hands or be triggered by some terrible thing that happened a long time ago to a subset of our ancestors or some other group to whom we feel sympathy. “History without tears” is actually “history without throat-clearing moralizing about bad things that happened.” That is why, as I have said on the podcast, I don’t say “Of course, it was racist to burn down those indigenous villages.” First, that was a long time ago and happened to people I never knew even if I am descended from them, among others, and me getting all weepy about it would serve no purpose other than to signal my own moral superiority. Second, part of the wonderful journey of history is making one’s own decisions about the pros and cons and goods and evils that brought us to today. Did the Constitution protect slavery, or create the mechanism for its abolition? The answer to that compound question is clearly “yes,” but it is up to you, the student of history, to decide the composition of that particular “yes.”

That is the journey that rewards and enlarges the student of history. Don’t let anybody take it away from you.