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Don’t Back Down

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A long time ago I wrote an editorial in the Billings Gazette attempting to defend the National History Standards from conservative criticism.  The Standards were, according to the conservative columnist George F. Will, waging “a war of aggression against the Western Political tradition and the ideas that animate it.” According to Lynne Cheney, the Standards “make it sound as if everything in America is wrong and grim.” Backed by academic historians, the creators of the National History Standards were shoving aside famous and important Americans who students ought to learn about in favor of people and topics that were, in the language of the time, “politically correct.”

At that time, I wrote, the promoters of the National History Standards had been “too timid” in their defense of their work.  The conservative critics, I wrote, were not arguing in good faith.  They had “not focused on scholarship, and the canons of argumentation and proof that accompany this pursuit, but on the very subject matter of much of the recent historical writing.”  They could not prove that the history was wrong, so they announced that they did not like the content. Theirs was, I said, “a knee-jerk, intolerant, and culturally insensitive response to the recognition that people of all races, cultures, colors and creeds contributed to what we now recognize as a complex American past, and that no understanding of that past can be achieved without examining the role played by all Americans.” Calling something “politically correct,” like calling something “woke” today, I wrote, “has become a conservative smear to be employed against anyone who calls for a more inclusive, complex, and truly democratic portrayal of the past.”

That editorial appeared in January of 1995, a bit over thirty years ago. Think about that. I have been at this for a long time. The words I wrote then are still applicable today.

And as tired as I sometimes feel, it is as important now as it was then to resist, to engage with those who hate and fear what we do without truly understanding the nature of our work.

Just last week, President Trump issued another of the unconstitutional pronouncements that he alleges are “executive orders” with the force of law. Aiming his ire at the Smithsonian Institution, Trump declared that “over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” These historians, he said, have sought “to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”  Instead of “fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.”

The president cited some examples.  The Smithsonian American Art Museum, he said, had challenged, in Trump’s words, “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” (If you want evidence of the virulence of Trump’s racism, well, there you go). A Fascist, Trump is angry that the museum asserted that “race is a human invention.” It’s incredible, really. We who resist are fighting a battle that has been going on for ages.

That is why I love the statement from Loyola Marymount University in defense of its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

We practice diversity, equity, and inclusion because we are Catholic and our faith and the First Amendment protect our right to live out these values. Efforts to restrict DEI are in opposition to Christ’s teachings or radical inclusion and love. Loyola Marymount University will continue to champion academic freedom, social justice, and human dignity not as politics, but as moral imperatives required by our faith.

            It is direct, defiant, and unapologetic. Historians should take note. Trump is going to do enormous damage to our work. Hours before I wrote these words, I learned that a fantastic, NEH-supported project at Brown University examining the enslavement of Indigenous New Englanders had its grant revoked. Friends worked for years on this monumental project that answers important questions about the American past. Trump and his thugs killed the program.

They will hurt us and they will score points. They will please the racists. So much of what they do, after all, is about protecting and upholding white supremacy.  But in other ways, they have already lost this fight. That is why reasoning with them can be like talking to a caged rat. They won’t listen to truths they are afraid to confront. But to teach that race and racism are hard-wired into the Nation’s founding documents, after all, is hardly a revolutionary insight any longer. That race, as a nefarious social construct, has wielded enormous power for evil in America’s past is a basic statement of fact. That New York, where I teach now, became the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that at times and places violated the laws of the United States, is hardly controversial at all. Its a fact. Our efforts, in other words, have already carried the day. Even as the textbooks lag behind, we have done the work. Our students know that an uncritical and celebratory history of the United States is bullshit. They know that history matters, and they expect that it will include stories that connect with their own, and that explore—and explain—the enormous gap that sometimes exists between the way things are and the way they ought to be.

Some of you who read these words are college professors.  I am willing to bet that you have been approached by a student, probably many times over the course of your career, who told you how they could not believe they were never taught this stuff in high school. You want to teach a kid to not respect this nation’s history? Lie to her about it.

But that is what our amoral leader is calling for. An angry and unlettered old man, he will do his damage. He will try to destroy the archives and the libraries and museums that bring this inclusive and complex history to more and more people every year. He will, and already has attempted to, ruin the lives of those who do this work. He will try to silence museum workers, archivists, librarians, writers and teachers who know at the very marrow of their being that it is not their job to tell students comforting stories about the past, but rather, to teach them to ask questions about the past and insist on reasoned, reasonable and evidence-based answers. If things are this way, why could they not have been another way, and so on—we play a role in unleashing the revolutionary capacity of an inquiring mind. Trump will promote charlatans and whores like JD Vance who will say anything, even when they know better, to win the approval of the amoral leader.  They will continue to beat up on the weakest people they can find, the refugees, the immigrants, the poor and the marginalized.  But they cannot suppress the stories we tell about the past. Not entirely. Let those of us who are privileged in these dark times to be able to do this important work, stand tall in defiance of these dangerous and unthinking enemies of justice and free thought.

History and Historians

James Kirby Martin and Edward Countryman

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Earlier this semester I learned that James Kirby Martin passed away. He was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Houston. Last week, I learned that Professor Edward Countryman of Southern Methodist University had died as well. In the span of several weeks, two very important historians of the American Revolution in New York State had left us.

            I did not know Edward Countryman well. We spoke when our paths crossed at conferences. He was always interested and interesting, the kind of senior scholar who was consistently welcoming and encouraging toward his younger colleagues. From the beginning of my career as a historian, I loved Professor Countryman’s work. His book, A People in Revolution, I read during my first few weeks in grad school at Syracuse. Countryman captured the excitement of the Revolution, the tension and the violence as well, in a work that I found deeply impressive. I wrestled with questions my undergraduate education never forced me to confront about the nature of the Revolution and its consequences. When I first taught my course on the American Revolution, I assigned A People in Revolution. It was probably too much for most of my undergraduates in Montana, but those who persevered learned that the Revolution involved movements that engaged people who previously had been excluded from imperial and provincial networks of power. Researching and writing this book must have been a massive undertaking, and teaching it helped me understand in new ways the complexity of the story.

            When I began to assemble lectures for my own course on the Revolution, I relied heavily, and even assigned a few times, Countryman’s brief one-volume history of the American Revolution published by Hill and Wang. It’s a wonderful brief synthesis that conveys the excitement and energy, and the significant shortcomings, of the Revolution. Countryman was truly a historian who worked from the bottom of society upwards, bringing the insights of what at the time was called the “new social history” to the Revolution. When I taught the American History survey course, I assigned Americans: A Collision of Histories. I hated the big textbooks then in vogue in survey courses. If you are going to teach a survey, it is best to assign a book you are willing to read and able to enjoy.  It was a perfect brief survey of the first half of the American story.

Edward Countryman

            I paid less attention to James Kirby Martin’s work when I was in grad school. He was more interested in military history, it seemed to me, and that is not where my interests rested. It turned out that assessment was, like many grad student judgments, both harsh and incomplete, for Jim had eclectic interests.

I met Jim for the first time early in 2009 at the American Historical Association conference in New York. It was a job interview of sorts, and Jim played a large role in bringing me to the University of Houston in the fall of 2009. I enjoyed teaching at UH, and I liked my colleagues, but Houston was a bad fit for my family. We bolted. Though I only lasted a year, Jim did all he could to persuade us to stay. As a colleague during my year in Texas, Jim was always friendly and supportive (I realize that not all my UH colleagues felt the same way about him). I never would have written a book on the Treaty of Canandaigua had not Jim asked me to contribute to the series he edited for Oxford University Press. It feels like every year I tell one student or another to look at Jim’s biography of Benedict Arnold. Jim remained a productive and active scholar until the end. He could not have been farther politically from Ed Countryman. Jim was a devout Christian and a Tea Party conservative. What too many of our critics fail to recognize is that it is the work that matters. Both historians produced work that mattered.

James Kirby Martin

            Martin and Countryman both wrote about the Iroquois during the Revolutionary era. Jim Martin’s Forgotten Allies, co-written with Joseph T. Glatthaar, provided readers with a sweeping narrative history of the Oneidas’ experience during the war. He drew a large audience, became close with the Oneidas of New York, and for a time pursued the possibility of turning portions of the book into a motion picture. Jim loved the history of New York State. He was a regular attendee at the Fort Plain History Conference. The last time Martin and I spoke was during a Zoom call. I was trying to assemble a group of historians interested in constructing a “1779 Project” to look closely at the role of Indigenous dispossession in New York State. Jim attended as a representative of the Oneidas. He and I did not see eye-to-eye on the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, but nonetheless I was glad to see him. Though I soon thereafter left the project and took my work in another direction, I am glad that Jim and I had kept in touch after I left Houston. I wish I would have reached out more often.

            Countryman’s most significant contribution was his 1996 article in the William and Mary Quarterly entitled “Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the American Revolution.” It came out just before I moved back to New York, and just before I began thinking seriously about the Haudenosaunee. Countryman, in a historiographical essay that ranged widely in its 22 pages, placed dispossession at the center of the Revolution in New York. “Fostering public virtue, rewarding soldiers of the Revolution, and establishing American communities all figured among the motivations of the architects of the American land system,” he wrote. “So did paying the national debt without anybody except Indians having to sacrifice.”

BACK IN 2013 at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture conference in Baltimore, several of us mid-career historians gathered for lunch. Thinking about the sorry state of the academic job market, one of us mused that we were among the last generation of tenured full professors in our field. Since that time, as assaults on public higher education intensify, the situation has become even more dire. There is a sadness, for me, in watching an earlier generation of prolific and important historians exit the stage while my profession succumbs to the death by a thousand cuts inflicted by right-wing ideologues, troglodytes and trolls; neoliberal approaches to university management; and the growth of a feckless class of college administrators with degrees in “higher education” who have done their best to suck the life out the system. Martin and Countryman both did work that matters. At a time when our profession is under assault, as politicians join in criticism of history and historians, and as schools go through restructurings that will change and diminish them forever, it’s worth keeping in mind all that we have lost. 

History and Historians

On This Day in History: The Chumash Revolt of 1824

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            There are histories we remember, and there are histories we forget.  There are histories revealed and histories concealed.  Some stories are considered important and of value. Others are dismissed as trivial or unimportant. I never knew of the Chumash Revolt of 1824. Today is the anniversary of the beginning of that rebellion. This is a story of a people’s attempt at independence.

Too many histories of Native American are, at their core, stories of white America. They are stories of settlement advancing westward, with Indians thrown in. These histories begin with Columbus, talk about the Indians who encountered the first English Colonists, and their successors who marched into the American interior. A history of Indigenous America, that frees itself from colonial timelines, that allows the history of Indigenous peoples to flow through its own channels, is a rare thing indeed.

            I grew up in Ventura, California. Every chance I get I go back there.  I still consider Southern California home, despite having lived in New York for most of the past thirty years.  And at school, despite walking on a landscape rich with meaning for the history of Chumash peoples, it was a story we never learned.  No one every mentioned the Chumash in elementary school or high school. There was talk of the missions, required in California’s social studies curriculum, and vague references to “Indians,” but nothing more than that.

            One of the things I decided to do when I began work on the first edition of Native America was to write about the native communities on whose lands I have lived during my life.  It was a way to avoid a narrative that simply marched westward across the continent. So I wrote about the Crows in Montana, where I taught for the first four years of my career; and the Dakota Sioux, because my family was from Minnesota; the Caddos because of my brief sojourn in the Houston area, and the Senecas because of my long residence in the Genesee Valley.  And the Chumash.  Because I was born. on their land along the California coast.

            In the book’s opening chapters I tell students of the poorly-documented by the sixteenth century Spanish explorer Cabrillo to the region.  Then the Chumash drop from the story for a while. The Chumash encountered few Europeans during the many decades after Cabrillo’s small fleet departed. A few expeditions sailed along the coast, stopping briefly, but little evidence exists as to what they did or where, precisely, they visited. They thus had little experience with European intruders, and little reason to fear the Spanish who returned in the second half of the eighteenth century. I wish I knew more about that history.

            When the Spanish arrived in 1769 to secure their hold on the coast of what they called Alta California from their European rivals, José de Gálvez, the visitador of New Spain, instructed Gaspar de Portolá to undertake that task. Both Gálvez and Portolá recognized that they must treat the large numbers of native people on the coast with kindness and respect. Only with the assistance of native peoples could they control California’s verdant coastline. They lacked the soldiers and the funds for a military conquest, so Gálvez placed the “Sacred Expedition,” in the hands of a small number of soldiers and Franciscan missionaries.

            More than 300,000 native peoples, speaking perhaps as many as a hundred languages, lived within the boundaries of present‐day California. California was a paradise then.  Sixty thousand lived along the coast between San Diego and San Francisco. A quarter of the plant species found in North America grow in California; more species of plant and animal can be found in California than in any other region of its size in North America. It was no surprise, then, that Portolá’s men described the Chumash as living in thriving communities. The Chumash generously traded with Portolá’s men, so much so that the Spanish leader described them as a “tractable” and “pleasant” people who felt “no fear of us.” Thousands of Chumash occupied towns and villages along the Santa Barbara Channel. They lived by the waterside, harvesting an enormous variety of readily available resources. In special storage houses they kept large stockpiles of dried sardines, anchovies, bonito, and other fish, along with seeds, nuts, and grains in adequate quantities to hold numerous feasts for Portolá’s men. Chiefs organized celebrations, designed perhaps to impress the Spanish newcomers with their wealth and power.

            Portolá sought their alliance, but the Chumash looked to secure the friendship of these newcomers as well. The Spanish were impressed both by the abundance of food the Chumash collected, the variety of their economic pursuits, and the great reach of their trade networks. “Some of them,” wrote one Spanish observer, “follow fishing” while “others engage in small carpentry jobs; some make strings of beads, others grind red, white and blue clays.” The Spanish wrote that the Chumash produce “variously shaped plates from the roots of oak and alder trees, and also mortars, crocks, and plates of black stone, all of which they cut out with flint, certainly with great skill and dexterity.” They made arrows to “an infinite number,” and “the women go about their seed sowing, bringing the wood for the use of the house, and water, and other provisions.”

            Despite the obvious signs of prosperity, of regional trade and a system of currency based on the manufacture of shell beads, and despite the obvious sophistication of Chumash social organization, the Franciscan missionaries who accompanied Portolá felt that the Indians would have to change. Everywhere they looked, the Catholic priests saw signs of Chumash savagery. Though the Chumash, according to one Spanish observer, lived in “communities that have fixed domiciles,” and they arranged their “well‐constructed” and “spacious and fairly comfortable” houses in organized settlements, the Franciscans hoped to relocate the Chumash to missions where they could more easily control them. Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who led this movement, ultimately established twenty‐one missions along the California coast, several of these among the Chumash. The Spanish constructed a presidio, or fort, at Santa Barbara in 1782, and a mission there, and at San Buenaventura, in 1786. La Purisima, near today’s Lompoc, followed one year later and Santa Ines, near Solvang, in 1808. The Santa Barbara Channel, in Serra’s view, was “full of a huge number of formal pueblos, and the most wonderful land.” Serra, now a Catholic Saint, is a controversial figure in my hometown.

            In the decade and a half that followed the establishment of the mission at Santa Barbara, according to one estimate, nearly 85% of the Chumash population relocated and settled under the supervision of the Spanish priests. A number of forces, working in unison, propelled this significant and abrupt movement of native peoples.

European diseases took their deadly toll, killing as many as two‐thirds of the Chumash living along the Santa Barbara Channel in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. During the same period, the enormous expansion in Spanish livestock herds compromised Chumash subsistence routines. Drought and fluctuations in sea temperature may have affected the availability of those resources upon which the Chumash relied for food. Fewer people facing significant subsistence crises, the loss of elders and ritual knowledge, and the critical numbers to maintain the integrity of their communities, the Chumash may have moved to the missions in an effort to insulate themselves from the frightening changes occurring in their world.

            Once they arrived at the missions, Chumash villagers may not have seen any fundamental contradiction between their traditional beliefs and those taught by the Catholic priests. Missionaries dressed in ceremonial attire when they said mass, led their community in song, and performed sacred rituals, like their own religious leaders. Their knowledge of the sacred set them apart from the broader community. Like the Pueblos before them, Chumash villagers may have seen in the Spanish cross something analogous to the large prayer poles upon which they made their own ritual offerings. Chumash at the Santa Inés mission, for example, hung strings of dried fish and chunks of venison upon the large cross that stood outside the church. At the outset, Chumash villagers would have had little reason to view their traditional beliefs as being in any way incompatible with those of the priests. The conflict that followed was not inevitable, and as historians we need to hold Europeans responsible for the cruelty of their acts.

            Once a group of Chumash villagers decided to relocate to the mission, it became more difficult for those who hoped to remain behind. Village economies collapsed, making feeding those who stayed even more difficult. Those who moved to the missions began working in the Franciscans’ fields, producing even more food and creating an environment where the missions seemed to offer both a source of subsistence and a community to which one might belong. But those who settled in the missions did not find relief. Death rates in the missions always surpassed birth rates. Between the years 1771 and 1820, according to one study, the average annual birthrate in the missions stood at 41 per 1000 mission Indians, while the death rate reached an average of 78 per 1000. Only two out of three children made it to their first birthday. Of these, 40% died before they reached the age of five. Few survived past their tenth birthday. Though few epidemics descended upon Alta California, chronic diseases such as dysentery took an enormous toll in Chumash lives. While the non‐Indian population reproduced rapidly, Indians succumbed in large numbers to illnesses in turn made more deadly by unhealthful living conditions, a brutal work regime, and, as one archaeologist noted, “the psychological impact of mistreatment in the missions and by cultural dislocation.” It is a horrifying story.

            Those who received baptism and survived (the Spanish called them “neophytes”), faced rigid discipline. In an attempt to impose their own sexual morality upon the Chumash, the priests confined unmarried men and women, some of whom experienced sexual abuse at the hands of Spanish soldiers, in separate crowded and unhealthful barracks. The Franciscans punished any transgression of their moral code by the neophytes with brutal beatings, the use of the lash, solitary confinement, and mutilation. Officials in the imperial center thought this brutality was not only cruel but terribly backwards. Alta California’s Governor Felipe de Neve, as early as 1778 hoped to transform the Indians of Alta California into useful subjects of the Spanish Crown by guaranteeing them a rudimentary municipal government and some control over their own communities. Neve opposed the use of corporal punishment, and believed that missions, by isolating Indians from the gente de razon, the Spanish settlers, retarded their improvement. They should interact with colonists, learn Spanish, and assimilate into the empire. The Franciscans, led by Serra, defied these efforts with all their energy, preserving a religious institution that had fallen out of favor amongst the Bourbon Reformers who took control of the empire late in the eighteenth century.

            The missionaries brutally exploited Chumash labor. The Chumash produced nearly everything consumed in or sold at the mission. They faced extraordinary limitations on their freedom. Still, Chumash men and women who settled in the missions seldom granted to the Franciscans all that the priests desired. Chumash elites continued to marry other elites, and those who led native communities outside of the missions often exercised leadership roles within. Chumash working in fields or tending Spanish livestock herds gathered traditional foods and hunted and fished as they always had done when the opportunity arose. Chumash herdsmen who worked too far from the missions to return every night established camps, like that at Saticoy near San Buenaventura, which became the basis for native communities.

Many neophytes clung to important elements of traditional belief. Some of the Chumash at Santa Inés continued to decorate prayer poles. At La Purisima, a twenty‐three‐year‐old man raised at the mission, and “instructed in everything appertaining to religion,” refused on his death bed to confess his sins and die “like a Christian.” Others ran away, joining Chumash communities in the interior where they reconstructed the social and familial relationships that always had given shape to their village communities. On occasion, the Chumash challenged directly the beliefs of the Franciscans. In 1801 a Chumash woman at Santa Barbara began to preach that non‐Christian Chumash would die if they received baptism. She had ingested datura, a hallucinogen that enabled Chumash travelers to encounter powerful spiritual forces in their cosmos. Like other prophets, she received a vision, and called upon her people to change their ways. The neophytes would suffer death as well, she said, unless they renounced Christianity, embraced their traditional beliefs, and washed their head with special water she called “tears of the sun.” The movement flashed brightly and spread rapidly, and Chumash people showered the prophet with gifts and offerings. The Spanish, clearly shaken, suppressed the movement the moment they learned of it. What, one frightened priest asked, would have happened had the prophet called upon her followers to kill the priests? The priests could not control the thoughts of the native peoples who settled in their missions.

            More than two decades later, a much larger uprising took place. Discontent amongst the mission Chumash had increased, and Chumash leaders at La Purisima began sending bags of beads into the interior to secure allies against the Spanish. Rumors of revolt became widespread, even if the Spanish did not take them seriously. Neophytes at Santa Inés, La Purisima, and Santa Barbara hoped to launch a coordinated attack on Sunday, February 22, 1824, during the celebration of the mass. On the Saturday before the uprising, however, an Indian from La Purisima traveled to Santa Inés to visit an imprisoned relative. The Spanish guard refused to allow the visitor to see his relative, and after an exchange of words, the guard ordered the visitor whipped for insolence. The Chumash at Santa Inés fought back. They burned most of the buildings at Santa Inés, sparing only the church. They then moved to the complex at La Purisima, which they captured after a brief firefight. The victorious Indians strengthened their defenses and prepared to hold the mission indefinitely.

La Purisima

            The next morning, Chumash at Santa Barbara under the leadership of Andrés Sagimomatsee seized control of that mission. Well aware that they could not hold it for long, owing to the proximity of the Spanish garrison at the presidio, they looted the mission and withdrew. Some crossed the channel to their old homes on Santa Cruz Island; the majority headed toward the Tulares, a five‐day march to the east in the interior. They found here shelter and a highly defensible location, establishing in effect a Native American maroon community that the Spanish could attack only with great difficulty.

The Chumash held La Purisima for nearly a month. On March 16, the Spanish attacked, exchanging musket and artillery fire with the defenders. The Spanish ultimately retook the mission, and sentenced seven of the rebels to death. Meanwhile, the Spanish marched to the Tulares. They hoped to persuade the rebels to return. At first, the Chumash refused. “We shall maintain ourselves with what God will provide us in the open country,” they said. They did not turn their backs on all the changes the Spanish had brought. “We are soldiers, stonemasons, carpenters, etc.,” they told the Spanish commander, “and we will provide for ourselves by our work.” They saw the crafts they had learned in the missions as tools that could help them sustain themselves as free persons. The negotiations continued and finally, according to a Spanish observer, “in peace, mutual joy and satisfaction, they were convinced to take advantage of the general pardon” the Spanish had offered them to “return to the mission.” When the Indians returned to Santa Barbara in June, the Franciscans felt that the rebellion had come to a close. But nearly 400 refused to return. They moved farther east, putting more distance between themselves and the Spanish. The uprising of 1824 was not simply a strike against the heavy‐handedness of the mission, but part of a movement by Chumash peoples to secure their independence, to live their lives in a changed world upon their own terms.

            That’s why I told this story in a chapter dealing with the era of the American Revolution.  Independence can mean many things.  It is something most American identify with the Revolution. Americans sought independence from their colonial overlords.  They sought “Freedom” from the British.  Many Americans will argue that the Revolution was indeed founded to establish freedom and liberty. But the experience of hundreds of thousands of enslaved peoples, and millions of Indigenous people living on this continent, showed clearly that their own independence was never considered by American founders and European colonists.  This country was born out of exploitation, and it was shaped by systematic programs of dispossession and colonialism.

History and Historians

A Letter to a Very Good Student Contemplating Graduate School

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Every semester I find it more difficult to enthusiastically encourage students to pursue their dream of a Ph.D in history. You hope to become a professor some day, but the odds are long. I need to you to know that. This is no reflection on your talents, which I respect enormously. The job market is terrible, and I do not expect it to ever get better. Our work is neither valued nor understood by too many of our legislative leaders, which is a big deal for those of us who work in public higher education. Some of us work at institutions , like one I visited a while back in Missouri, where even the administrative leadership is entirely clueless about history and the liberal arts, and they luxuriate in their ignorance. Graduate school will consume some important years of your life when you might easily be doing something else that is more financially remunerative. Graduate school can be stressful. At its worst it can be demoralizing, depressing, and humiliating. It can beat you up.

It did all those things to me.

Yet, I loved my time in graduate school. I know it sounds crazy to say that. I feel immense gratitude to so many people who helped me along the way. I had a free ride with generous financial support, so I graduated without loans. I was very lucky. I had a fantastic cohort of fellow students, and I found in them incredibly important friendships and a mass of support. I look forward to seeing them when our travels put us in roughly the same location, whether that is a conference or merely passing through on an interstate highway. The professors with whom I worked, meanwhile, were fantastic, and I stay in touch with them to this day. I still draw upon them for advice. I know that I was one of the lucky ones. I found a tenure-track job right out of grad school. I have never worked as an adjunct. Admittedly my first job was at Hellhole State, but I was lucky again to find another tenure track job and escape. Things were so miserable at Hellhole State that I find it difficult to complain about things at my current college–I know how bad it can be elsewhere. I have been able to do my research, and teach basically whatever I want when I want. My teaching load is relatively light. I learned so much in graduate school.

And even with all this good luck, and how much I love what I do, I cannot be certain that I would be willing to pay the costs again. I want you to know that.

So when a bright and talented student like you asks me about graduate school, I am conflicted. Let’s say you have a kid someday and he tells you he wants to be a major league baseball player when he grows up. And he is pretty good. Great in little league, star of his high school team. You take him to private hitting lessons and travel ball tournaments. You encourage him, knowing full well that the odds of him making it to the majors are remote at best. If he loves baseball, and that is really what he wants to with his life, how can you not encourage him?

Sometimes I feel the chances of landing a tenure track job at a college or university where you will be happy are only slightly less daunting than making it to the Major Leagues and, unlike baseball, sometimes it has nothing to do with how good you are at your chosen profession. Academia is not a meritocracy. If your professors are honest with themselves, they will admit that this is true: there are many people out there with Ph.D. degrees in history who could do our jobs just as well as we do, but owing to the unfairness or bad luck, or macroeconomics, or a multitude of other forces, they never got the chance.

So I make sure a prospective graduate student like you understands the realities of the job market. Not just that “it’s bad,” but why it is bad, and why it is unlikely to improve.

I want you to understand that you should not take out loans if possible: if a graduate school is not willing to support you financially, it is not worthy of your talents. This is, of course, easier said than done, but given the state of the academic job market, I have to warn students about going into debt for a graduate degree that will tax them physically, financially, and perhaps emotionally.

There are some people you will meet who will tell you that your work is not good enough: one important way to avoid this trap is to never underestimate your self-worth and your value to an institution.

For me, there was enormous exhilaration that came with doing research, but not all graduate students feel like that at the end of their programs. Burn-out is real.

And consider this: the job does not always go to the hardest working or the most creative or innovative graduate student. Sometimes it goes to the person from an elite institution, or the person with an extraordinarily well-connected advisor at a college with a prestigious name, no matter how much that college seems in reality to be resting on its past laurels. Never, ever underestimate how elitist academia can be.

I hope you will think about these questions:

What is it about history that you love and how do you see pursuit of a Ph.D helping you with that?

How disappointed would you be if you did not find a job as a college professor? What else do you love doing, and might having a Ph.D help you achieve those alternative goals? (These cannot be considered “Plan B” options. I want you to think more broadly than the academy. When you finish you will have skills in research and writing, and a lot of knowledge. You will want to think creatively about how these skills can help you put food on the table and a roof over your head).

What do you think it is that professors do for a living? When you watch us, you may see the joy we take in teaching, and you may read about our scholarship and exciting research, but you may know nothing of committee meetings, scrounging for dollars to support research and travel, and the endless administrivia.

How important is it that you get to choose where you live? How important is it to be close to where you grew up, your friends, your family, and, perhaps, a significant other who may end up living someplace else? How adaptable do you see yourself: If you have lived your whole life in, say, western New York like my students, or in Southern California

In the Service of Clio: Blog CCXIII (213): Life in Hell Again
Though it need not be this bad an experience, it can actually take much more than four years.

like me, would you find it difficult to live in Texas or Billings, Montana, or some place that is so cold and snowy that you feel like you landed on the Ice Planet Hoth, or so hot and humid it makes your ears ring?

How do you envision your life five or ten years down the road? Do you want to have a family? Is it important to you to have the means to buy a house? Mind you, you can do all these things in graduate school if you have support and good luck, but I can tell you it is difficult. Do you have hobbies or other activities in which you engage which are so meaningful to you that it would be hurtful if you had to give them up? Do you like to surf? Or go see punk bands? Because that job in South Dakota may demand of you some important sacrifices. If you are in a relationship, and you want to keep that relationship going, your answers to these questions will inevitably affect your partner, too. Graduate school can be hard on relationships. You will be reading a lot. You will be writing a lot. Chances are you will need to be by yourself more than you ever have before. Are you comfortable being alone? You will have friends in graduate school, I hope, and they will nurture and nourish you, but it can be hard.

If you want to do this, I am happy to support you. I am honored to write a letter of recommendation in your behalf. If I have friends in the department to which you are applying, I will reach out to them and share my high regard for your talents. Do your research. Who are the best historians in the field that interests you, and do they work at a Ph.D granting institution? Write to that person, share your interests, and see if they are interested in working with you. Do they encourage you to apply or is their response lukewarm or uninterested. If it is possible to visit, or Zoom, or get to know them better, it might be worth an effort. That advisor will brag about your work if it is good, and the university to which you apply will benefit from your labor if you end up working for them as a teaching assistant. Do not be shy about investigating and interviewing your prospective teachers. Your advisor will be an important person in your life for the next few years. At the same time, remember, despite our howls of protest, that we to tend easily towards elitism. Remember that. I do not want you applying for a Ph.D at Slackjaw State University. People will judge you for it. I was once on a search committee with a Harvard Ph.D, who would not consider anyone from the South. It is wrong, totally, but you need to be aware of all that is wrong with this profession.

You were an immensely talented student. It was a joy to have you in my classes. I learned from teaching you. You have all the talent to succeed in graduate school. We would not be having this exchange if I did not feel that way. Knowing what I know of you, and what I have seen over the past four years at my college, you would make a fantastic college professor. I will do all I can to help you, and I encourage you to reach out to all of us who taught you here if you need help or encouragement. We will celebrate your successes and we are willing to buoy you up when you confront obstacles. You have a lot to think about. Eyes wide open, you know? I want you have a good understanding of what you are getting into. Remember always that you are always so more than what people think of your work, but that those of us here who knew you as an undergraduate are looking forward to celebrating each and every success you enjoy. It is a big decision. It cannot hurt to apply and see what opportunities present themselves to you. We got your back.

History and Historians

What Makes You Ask “Why?”

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There is a tweet by Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution that has raised the ire of more than a few historians.

I will admit that I do not follow Hamid’s work. I have read a piece he wrote for The Atlantic, but I have not read his books. Tweets are a poor way to communicate a complex argument, so I want to be charitable. A large number of critics responded to Hamid’s tweet by pointing out that historians have written important and illuminating books about Hitler and the Nazis, and about Stalin and Stalinism. They wrote about people and groups who they found utterly despicable.

Hamid’s argument, as he stated it on Twitter, is simplistic and short-sighted. But it is not entirely without merit. In another tweet in the thread, Hamid seemed to call upon scholars to honor what the historian Peter Novick long ago called “That Noble Dream,” the ideal of objectivity, in their scholarly work.

This echoes the basic advice many aspiring historians learn early in their schooling. Be aware of your biases, and try to shed them when you enter the library, archives, or study hall. You need to keep your eyes, your ears, and your heart open when you frame the questions that guide your research. Historians agree with Hamid that we all must be fair when we assess the evidence we uncover. But I still see this entire argument as problematic. It is precisely not the advice we should give to aspiring historians. Objectivity and neutrality are not he same thing.

What is it that causes you to ask “Why?” History is not a science, but it is a discipline. It is the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures. Historians ask questions about continuity and change, and they answer them in a thorough and disciplined manner. History is, for many of us, a subject we came to out of a sense that something is wrong, that there were better alternatives to our current reality that never were explored. Why? As the historian Tom Crick explained in Graeme Swift’s novel Waterland, the practice of asking “Why?” is fundamental to the human condition, and it emerges from a sense that not all is as it should be. Why did this happen? And why the conditions that led to that? And so on and so on and so on.

In Native American History I think this is especially the case. A student reads about an incident, an episode, or a historical process and is staggered by what she reads. She has to understand why this happened. She despises the people she studies, whether it is the Paxton Boys, the murderous militiamen at Gnaddenhutten, Chivington of Sand Creek, or the founders of the Indian boarding schools. If she works in a disciplined manner, her strong feelings will not stand in the way of sound academic work. Her passions and her interests brought her to the very questions she asks. Students always should write about those subjects that matter to them, those subjects that get under their skin. It is the questions that keep you up at night that lead to good historical work.

There is so much suffering in the past. If we are to pretend that the study of history will make things better, how can we not choose sides? History has been in the news so much during what I hope are the final weeks of the Trump administration. The President has called for a patriotic history that will teach children to love their country. In the same breath he denounces “socialist” educators who “hate America.” In a sense, Trump and Hamid share a belief that the strong feelings of a scholar will lead them to produce biased, partisan, and tendentious work.

But that is not how it works. There is dreadful and pointless history written by scholars who cling to the mantle of objectivity, and fantastic work written by activist historians. There is no necessary division between scholarship and activism when both are done honestly and in a disciplined manner.

History enters into everything. For every student who has looked at the world and thought, “this is not right,” and wondered how or why things have changed or failed to change, there is a historical answer. The young person, marching with a BLM banner may be driven to study the continued violence of law enforcement against peoples of color and conclude that systemic racism is a reality in American life. Her very existence, her understanding of the harsh realities of racism, led her to her academic work. Long ago, my own disgust about “Indian Removal,” a subject about which I knew little and responded to more on the level of emotion and sentiment rather than knowledge, launched me into a career in history.

Many of those who do not like what we say about the past will question our motives. They will assume that we are dragging up negative and hateful stories about the past because we hate the people or the places we study, and that we want or need our readers and students to hate those things as much as us. But that is not it at all. It is our sense that all is not well that leads us to ask questions about the past. We work because we are so aware of the enormous, yawning gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be, and we know that we will never bridge it without understanding how that chasm formed in the first place, and those who benefit from its continued existence.

History and Historians

What’s So Great about the American Revolution?

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Recently I attended a planning meeting for New York’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. National, state, and local organizations are planning events. Although I am all for public engagement with history and its consequences, discussions like these sometimes fill me with dread.

New York’s state historian Devin Lander convened this meeting at the Ganondagan State Historic Site, where French forces attacked and destroyed a Seneca town late in the seventeenth century. His goal is to create a commemoration that is inclusive and that incorporates the state’s history in all of its complexity and diversity. Hence the meeting at Ganondagan: the state historian agrees whole-heartedly that Native American history is New York State history. That’s a laudable and important goal, but it is going to be enormously challenging to pull it off. When it comes to commemorations, sometimes the desire to celebrate can cast out those who look at events with a critical eye.

Shawn McBurney, from the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, laid out his vision for the commemoration at the national level. America has never been perfect, McBurney said, but the commemoration effort should remind Americans that the nation has always tried to do better. McBurney emphasized “contributions” made by different groups to the American story. He spoke of emphasizing “the continued vitality of American institutions,” and the “shared ideals and values” embraced by Americans. The tone struck me as celebratory, as in “we” have accomplished something special, unique, and valuable in world history over the course of the past two and a half centuries. I am not always sure that “we” have worked to make things better: some us, to be sure, but hardly all of us. And that part of McBurney’s job is to raise funds from corporate donors makes me wonder how critical a reassessment of our shared past might result from these efforts. McBurney, too, has a difficult job.

Other speakers pointed out that the American Revolution is the source of ideals that we as a nation have not completely realized. They spoke of the Revolution as something that is “continuing” and “unfinished.” So Whiggish, I thought. Onward and upward. Always progressing. Always getting better. Our failures are not failures because we have not completely had a chance to fail yet.

The American Revolution, no doubt, is an important event. Obviously it led to the creation of the United States. Like a child, however unlovable it becomes as it matures, this birth of a new nation we view almost automatically as cause for celebration.

But was the Revolution a good thing? I asked the question at this meeting. The answers, to me, seemed fumbling. It is not the job of historians to describe events as good or bad, I was told. But we do that all the time. Hitler? He was bad. Penicillin? That was a good thing. See? It’s easy. So I ask again, was the Revolution a good thing? Did it make the world a better place? Seriously. We assume so, but was it objectively, demonstrably so?

Was it something more than a chapter in the long story of vicious frontier warfare that began fifteen years before the Revolution and continued for another fifteen afterwards? It was a nightmare for many native peoples in the eastern half of the continent. For enslaved peoples? A handful found freedom as a result of the Revolution, but the vast, vast majority remained enslaved and confronted hardening racial attitudes in the new republic. Women? Nope. The Revolution did nothing for them, and the Founders made no effort to “remember the ladies.” Revolution, war, and the economic dislocation that accompanied these ruined many people.

Well, of course, the promoters of commemoration might reply. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. You have overlooked the liberating forces set free, the “transforming hand of Revolution.” Those “self-evident truths” described by Thomas Jefferson in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence included the “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Revolution was about freedom, liberty, and maybe a bit of equality. We began a journey in 1776, and we are getting closer to completing it every day.

Never mind that Jefferson never came close to living up to those ideals in his own life. If after the passage of two and a half centuries we have not yet fully lived up to those revolutionary ideals, isn’t it possible that we really do not value them much at all? America’s commitment to liberty and equality has been ambivalent at best. Great Britain, America’s opponent during (and after) the Revolution, abolished slavery before the United States without five years of fratricidal warfare, and it recognized the rights of women to cast ballots earlier as well. Certainly it is true that revolutionary movements in other parts of the world have borrowed the language of the American Revolution, but they seem more into its rhetoric than its substance. If after two-and-a-half centuries we continue to live in communities where inequality is so readily apparent, perhaps it is not unreasonable to ask whether we really do cherish liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy.

Perhaps we claim too much for the Revolution. Though historians have produced important scholarship, my students are shocked by revolutionary violence, saddened by the disruptions it caused, disappointed by its promises unfulfilled. Changes–at the local, continental, and global level–that are sometimes attributed to the Revolution may have occurred without it.

So what do we do, then, as part of a commemoration of the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution? I hope we can leave behind uncritical stories of patriotism and heroism, of great leaders and Founders’ Chic. I hope we can avoid a repeat of the orgy of self-congratulatory nonsense that accompanied the bicentennial celebration forty-three years ago. When the American Battlefield Trust, for instance, states that the semiquincentennial “provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to celebrate the democratic ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – principles that continue to guide us as a country and inspire people throughout the world,” I am skeptical. Can anyone honestly look at the conduct of our Bronze Creon, or Moscow Mitch McConnell, or the Republican party generally, and see any semblance of “democratic ideals” at all?

I hope that this commemoration looks instead at the different revolutionary experiences of people living on this continent to assess what the Revolution was, what it changed, and why it mattered. It is the sort of work that historians like Kathleen DuVal and Maya Jasanoff are doing, both in books my students are reading this semester in their course on the American Revolution. Different people experienced different Revolutions, and for many there was little in their story to celebrate.

Perhaps it is a function of commemorations to invoke patriotism, but that is not the job of historians. If commemorations there shall be, whether at the local, state, or national level, we historians must cast a critical eye on the troubling events of these violent years. History can be a brutal business. We historians tolerate myths poorly. We hold nothing sacred, save the critical methods we have learned over years of training. It is not our responsibility to help Americans feel good about their past. It is our job to point out to Americans their inattention and lack of interest in values and ideals for which their attachment to is hardly self-evident.

History and Historians

Scholarship and Activism

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In the epilogue to her powerful The Beginning and End of Rape, Sarah Deer wrote about the day she received a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation announcing that she had won one of their coveted “Genius” prizes. The honor, so richly-deserved, would not change her, she wrote. Deer would continue to combine her activism and scholarship to help Native American communities.

“History repeats itself.” What history teacher has not heard that line from a student? “Those who do not know their past are doomed to repeat it.” That was George Santayana’s old apothegm. In each, history is a force, marching endlessly in a circle. Because so few people indeed know their history, it becomes a sentence. If we are lazy, we can see the past as depressing, and outcomes as inevitable, or tragic. The past becomes a burden, a weight that can drag you down. I have felt that way at times and I have written about it on this blog. If you study the past, I am willing to bet that you have felt that way at times, too.

When I was taught long ago how to be a historian in the one-semester methods class I took at Cal State Long Beach, my professor emphasized the importance of objectivity. Several years later, one of my professors at Syracuse, a member of my dissertation committee, wrote at length in much of his own scholarship about the emergence of objectivity as a value in historical scholarship. Many of those who criticize our work, from outside the guild and within, may raise objections to it by suggesting that we are biased, and driven by our agendas. We might be left wingers, or “politically correct,” scholars more close-minded than we realize, and hampered by ideology from doing the simple work of reciting the facts that, brick by evidentiary brick, make up that edifice called history.

We might explain that this is not how we work, that this is not history at all. And it certainly is not how we should teach our students to work. History is not a science, but it is a discipline. Our research should be conceived, composed, and conducted in as objective and as disciplined a manner as we can. Of course we must be fair. We must keep our minds open and we must be honest enough with the evidence and our own assumptions that we are able to see clearly when they do not go together.

But the work we do, at the end of the day, is about answering questions. The questions that present themselves to us–that strike us as important, and worth answering–come from our experiences in life and in the archives, from our hard work, and, quite often, from our sense that all is not well.

Read history for a while and you will feel regret. Asking why a certain reality is ours can lead a curious mind to wonder if indeed other realities were possible. And if other possibilities existed, why did they not come to be? Who benefited from this particular outcome, and what might they have had to lose through other outcomes? And if one of these possible outcomes is superior to our current state of affairs, how do we get there? History can make clear the yawning gap between the way things are and they way things might have been.

In the opening of The Beginning and End of Rape, Deer makes the point that the current crisis afflicting native communities on and off-reservation is not an “epidemic.” Calling it that, she points out, makes it seem natural, unavoidable, beyond immediate human causes. That’s the wrong way to look at it, she writes. Rape, Deer argues, which “should be the number one priority for tribal nations,” because “all other challenges faced by tribal nations are linked to the history and trauma of rape,” resulted from the conscious choices made by the many and varied agents of colonialism over five centuries.

For Deer, as for many who study the past, there is a massive chasm between the way things are and the way things ought to be. To not ask the natural and logical question that follows is an abdication of responsibility: if history can guide us to a more perfect union, and if the lamp of experience illuminates a path to a better future by helping us to identify historical alternatives, how can we responsibly look away? To ask, “Why this?” leads easily to “Why not an alternative past?”

Encourage your students’ activism. Teach them the hard work involved in scholarship. Teach them to avoid polemic, to be fair, to ask tough questions of themselves and others, and to respect the discipline. Teach them that others will judge their work on the quality of their evidence, the thoroughness of their research, the rigor of their argument, and the grace and style of its presentation. Teach them that expertise is earned, not asserted. But do not allow a commitment to objectivity to stifle the questions, and hard-won answers, that can present themselves to any open-minded student of the past. Almost nothing was inevitable, and almost always there were other choices that men and women in the past might have made. There were almost always other possible outcomes.

History and Historians

A Death in the Family

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On October 7, 1968, Billy Van Tassel died in the Long An Province of South Vietnam.  His unit operated near Tan Tru, an area characterized by hard fighting and heavy casualties. He was from Scarsdale, New York, and was two months shy of his twenty-first birthday.  He was my second cousin, though I never knew him.  He died fifty years ago today.

Because I am a historian, I tend to think a lot about the past. It’s an obvious statement, I suppose. History, I tell my students, is the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures.  I try to teach my students to understand the significance of the past, to understand past events, and why they mattered.  I try to persuade them to see the connections between events, even when at first they are not apparent.  Sometimes those connections are incredibly difficult to find, but real nonetheless.

And there were many significant events in 1968.  “Identify and give the significance of the Tet Offensive,” my friends and colleagues might ask.  It began in January, a series of coordinated North Vietnamese attacks that made clear that the American government’s reports and bulletins about progress in the war were at best rosily optimistic, and at worst brazen lies.  Or the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of that year, or Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles two months later.  Identify and give the significance of the Democratic National Convention, where Chicago policemen serving that city’s autocratic mayor bludgeoned anti-war protestors in the streets at the end of the summer.

Billy was one dead soldier, one of more than 16,500 American service members who died during that terrible year, one of the 57,000 Americans who died in all during the Vietnam War.  Against that backdrop, his life may not amount to much. Many families suffered.

So what is it that makes an event significant? Does it have to change the world, disrupt the established order of things, ring in a new era, or carry some measurable consequence?  I sometimes ask my students to identify the most significant historical events in their lives.  They ask for clarification but I encourage them to do their best.   They will mention the attacks on 9-11, though they are too young to remember them. They might mention the election of Barack Obama, though some of them are young enough that they do not remember that historic night either.  They are so young.  They will come up with a range of answers: Sandy Hook, Pope Francis, the tsunami in Japan, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, Donald Trump.  I listen. Then I ask them again to tell me about the most important event in their lives. What events made you who you are?  I suggest to them some possibilities: a first kiss or a first broken heart; the birth of a sibling, a marriage, or a death in the family, an act of cruelty or an act of kindness.  Were there events in your life, I ask them, things that you experienced, after which nothing ever was the same?  Billy Van Tassel’s death, I think, was one of those events.

 

 

 

I am trying to learn what I can about Billy Van Tassel.  He was born in 1947.  The Long An Province,  where he fought, was a region where the Saigon government and the Communists vied for the control and allegiance of the local populace.  If Jeffrey Race is right in his book War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province, that struggle already was over as early as 1965, when Billy was still a student at Fordham Prep, still running track, still studying Latin and Greek, still editing the school newspaper and the senior yearbook.  He graduated in 1965. I have no idea what he did between then and his enlistment in 1968.  His tour began on the Fourth of July, three days after the official beginning of the “Counteroffensive Phase V Campaign.”  He served in B Company, 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry Regiment, in the 9th Infantry Division of the United States Army.  He joined his fellow soldiers in fighting to recover territory lost earlier that year during the Tet Offensive.  American forces came in, hard and heavy, and then the South Vietnamese arrived and began rooting out communist fighters.  In Race’s view, the strategy could not succeed.  They were separating fish from water, the American commanders said, removing the communist fighters from the towns and villages of South Vietnam.  But the violence they deployed in this counteroffensive was too extreme, too indiscriminate, and it may actually have increased the number of militants.

I know nothing of Billy’s experience in Vietnam. He wrote letters home to his mother. I would like to see those letters someday. He asked her to send him magazines about cars, I am told.  He was really into cars. I know nothing about the men with whom he served, the battles in which they fought, the horrors they may have experienced, though I hope to learn more.  I have found a directory of men who served in the 2nd Battalion during the war, and from that I can piece together a list of names of men who fought in B Company, Billy’s unit. To track those men down, I suspect, will take a lot of detective work, running down a lot of leads.  I have found photographs online taken by men who fought with B Company in 1968, but I did not see Billy in any of them, though all I know of his appearance comes from his yearbook photo.  War, and the passage of time since someone snapped that senior yearbook photo, might have changed his appearance. I believe there is a lot I still can learn about his brief time overseas, but I am not certain of the strength of the connections he forged while overseas. He died three months after he arrived in Vietnam, “small arms fire” given as the cause of his death.  Three months. The semesters at the school where I teach are longer than that.  He was a sergeant, promoted posthumously, so maybe he did really well in basic training, or gained a promotion on the battlefield.  I wish I knew. There are people out there who know, but I do not know who they are.

Billy Van Tassel volunteered. He was not drafted.  That is what the family says. That blows my mind. He went to Vietnam in 1968, well after things seem to have turned south. He arrived in Vietnam as the anti-war movement at home grew in strength, and after that opposition caused President Johnson to decide against seeking reelection.  He arrived in Vietnam after many officials in the Department of Defense had concluded, if we are to believe the Pentagon Papers, that the war could not be won.  He volunteered, turning down scholarship offers to Fordham University and Boston College.  Despite his family’s pleas that he attend college, he decided to enlist.

Everyone I spoke with thought that a number of factors went into his decision. “He felt it was a just war at the time,” one of his cousins told me, and he wanted to serve his country. He wanted to do his part. He may have wanted to impress his father, who had served in World War II.

William Van Tassel, Sr., served with the 774th Bomber squadron, 463 Bombardment Group, in the 15th Air Force in North Africa and Italy. The elder Van Tassel entered the service late in 1942. He was thirty-eight years old.  He went to Utah for some training, according to his discharge papers, and then to the Mediterranean theatre.  The 463rd was a heavy bomber group, flying B-17 “Flying Fortress” planes.

Billy’s dad was classified as an Air Operations Specialist 791, which meant that his job required that he assist

“in the administration of the Army Air Force Operations Office. Supervise or assist in the preparation and maintenance of individual flight records and related reports, preparation of operating orders authorizing flight missions, check lists for periodic instrument tests, and aircraft damage and accident reports, and issuance of flying clothing and personal equipment to aircraft personnel and passengers.”

He also would have supervised or assisted

“in the dispatching of air planes by preparing flight routes and logs of position reports of outgoing or incoming aircraft, obtaining clearances and information as to weather conditions and communication with other stations regarding flights from station and course of transient aircraft.”

This means that it is not likely that he served on board an aircraft.  I am trying to learn more, but a letter from the director of the National Personnel Records Center to my uncle’s congressman indicated that his service records were housed “in the area that suffered the most damage” in a fire that took place at the St. Louis facility in July of 1973.  “The fire destroyed the major portion of records of Army military personnel for the period from 1912 through 1959, and records of Air Force personnel with surnames Hubbard through Z for the period 1947 through 1963.” Much of what I might have found out there, as a result, is gone, burned up.  Even if he were not in combat, maybe seeing so many younger men leave and not return over the course of the two years he spent there had an effect.  Casualty rates for bomber crews were high.  Everyone agrees that the war changed him, that he was never the same again. He had “combat fatigue.”  The kids used to joke that he was not always with it, that he was a “dead head.”  Before the war he was “outgoing and personable,” but afterwards, he stopped speaking.  He sat at family gatherings, content to hold a baby on his lap, but largely uncommunicative other than that. Family members believe he suffered from what today we might call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

He worked with my grandfather selling tires after the war.  A lot of people worked for my grandfather.  When my grandfather moved his family to California, William found work cleaning up the courts at a tennis club. His wife Cecelia, my grandfather’s sister, worked as a secretary in the Manhattanville College library. Sometimes they needed help making ends meet. I am told she was friends with Jean Harris, who later was convicted of the murder of Dr. Tarnower, of Scarsdale Diet fame, and may even have visited her in prison.

A damaged man returned from a horrific war, whose son signed up for an unpopular war, and fought there for three months before somebody shot him.  The family’s suffering continued.  Billy’s sister, Mary Ann, died four years later. She ran a stop sign in Newburgh, New York, right in front of the town hall.  It was a sunny afternoon in January of 1973.  She hit another car, and her vehicle flipped.  The Newburgh newspaper has a photograph of people trying to save her, but you can see the resignation in their faces.  There was nothing they could do.  Her neck was broken, and she died twenty minutes after the accident.

 

People seem to expect a lot from historians, when they pay attention to historians at all.  They have questions, and they want answers. Sometimes they want reassurance, for us to tell them the course they are following, as nations or as individuals, is right or justified.  But some questions have no answers.  Or, perhaps, there are questions that historians cannot answer in their role as historians.  That uncertainty can be unsettling for some, when the past can provide no path forward and the past, itself, cannot be known.  How much can we really know about what happened before us? We learn the facts, and collect what strikes us as relevant.  We gather the evidence.  We know where to look.  But those interior worlds—why did the person we are studying do this or do that? Why did that person make one choice before another? What were they thinking, and what did they feel?  Were they happy, sad, fearful, or full of regrets? And what and how does it matter anyways?

 

 

There used to be a poster that hung in the garage of the house where I grew up.  My sister remembers it, too.  My mom made it when we both were kids.  Red and white paint, smeared violently together, with the silhouettes of soldiers and gravestones, and in black block letters across the top, “End The War.”

My dad did not know what happened to it.  He thought that maybe he had tossed it. Then we asked my mom.  No, she remembered. They still had it.  They dug around in the closet of what once had been my sister’s room and they found it.

It has been at least three decades since I last saw that picture, but with the exception of some dried flowers on one of the dark tombstones, it was exactly as I remembered it. It left an impression.  I have always wondered why.

 

The death of Billy Van Tassel made my mother angry.  She had opposed the war before Billy’s death, but had not involved herself in protest or anything like that. My sister and I were young.  We grew up in a house where I was never allowed to play with guns.  That, too, my mom said, was a product of Billy’s death.  My own visceral hatred of America’s gun culture? It could have more proximate origins, of course, but the seeds might have been planted long ago.

So many questions. Some I cannot yet bring myself to put on paper.  Uncomfortable questions, and certain uncertainties.  Historians, I suspect, understand this.  We tend to accept the messiness of the past, the inconsistencies we cannot explain, the questions we cannot answer, the riddles for which we lack the last clue.  Aware completely that there always will be questions we cannot answer, onward we go anyways, searching for answers.  Until we can’t any longer.

Military service records for Vietnam veterans are open to immediate family—fathers and mothers and siblings and children.  Billy Van Tassel has no one.  His father and mother died long ago.  His sister is gone.  The National Archives will open his records seventy-five years after his death, a quarter of a century from now. So I talk to those with whom I can speak.  I gather what I can find.  But there is much I can never know.

Billy’s death must have been a shattering event. And like shattered glass, the cracks spread outward. For some they cut deep and left scars.  For the rest of us things were different to be sure, but it is sometimes difficult to see how, and to measure the weight of this event across the span of half a century.

History—the real history of our everyday lives—works like that. We are the things that we remember. We are the things that we forget.  We need to be honest about this. We are the product of facts and tales, truths and fables, the things that we know to be real and stories that we take on faith alone.  Perhaps we do so foolishly, or because of needs or inclinations long buried or barely recognized.  We are what we know and, truth be told, what we can never know.

We head nevertheless into the libraries or the archives.  We search about on the internet. Burdened with questions, we head out tired but relentless, searching for answers that may not exist.

Current Events, History and Historians

“Civilization Or Death To All American Savages”: On the “Commemoration” of Sullivan-Clinton, 1779

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“Civilization or Death to all American savages!”  That was one of a number of toasts offered by the officers who accompanied James Sullivan’s invasion of Iroquoia during the American Revolutionary War.  Planned and plotted by George Washington himself, the “Sullivan Campaign” burned dozens of Haudenosaunee towns, destroyed crops, orchards and fields, and forced the Iroquois to flee from their homelands toward the British post at Niagara.  There they suffered and died in large numbers during one of the worst winters on record.  In a letter to Lafayette, Washington expressed his hope that the expedition would eliminate the considerable threat hostile Iroquois posed to the rebel movement, “distract and terrify” them, and “extirpate them from the Country.”

I tell the story of the Sullivan Campaign in Native America.  You can also read a rather dry, nuts-and-bolts military history that focuses exclusively on the American side in Joseph Fischer’s A Well-Executed Failure.  Most recently, Colin Calloway in his fine examination of The Indian World of George Washington covers the expedition in all its brutality, from Van Schaick’s rape and murder of Onondaga women, to the atrocities committed by Sullivan’s men.  And it is not just academic historians with an interest in the story.  The Empire State Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, with financial backing from the William J. Pomeroy Foundation, has introduced its “Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779 Historic Marker Grant Program.”  The ESSSAR ( try saying that without sounding like Kaa) invites you or your organization “to help commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779 by erecting a specially designed Historical Marker.”  The Pomeroy Foundation “will provide full funding for the marker, pole, and shipping.” Installation is up to you.

If you want to submit a proposal for a historical marker, your time is running out.  The deadline is September 14th.  You can fill out the form here.

The website includes a small sample marker you might use as a template.  “Chugnut,” the sample reads, “Native American village near mouth of Big Choconut Creek destroyed by General Enoch Poor, August 18, 1779, Sullivan-Clinton Campaign.”

If this marker is an indication of things to come, it looks like this will be a history uninformed by the important recent scholarship on native peoples, focusing mostly on what Continental soldiers and officers did with little attention to destroyed towns and and shattered lives, the uprooting of a people and their transformation into refugees, and the atrocities committed against non-combatants.  Chugnut is there, but then it is not.  No sense of what it was before, or what became of the people who lived there.  No sense that the rise of New York as the Empire State could not have occurred without war and violence, and without a systematic campaign of dispossession carried out by the state against the Haudenosaunee.

The ESSSAR campaign information came to me during the summer. To some extent, I am still catching up with some of that email.  I do not have time, regrettably, to submit a proposal for signs.  That is my fault.  I would very much like to send a large number of suggestions. I get that I am too late.

But I hope the sponsors of this project will seek out Haudenosaunee voices and solicit their suggestions for marking the path carved by Sullivan’s men, and measuring the destruction it wrought.  The Sullivan Campaign was designed expressly to eliminate the Iroquois as a force in the western reaches of what came to be New York State.  The Americans wanted to erase their towns, destroy their food supplies, force them from their country, and drive them to starvation over the winter outside of Fort Niagara.  You might call this an invasion.  You might say this was war.  But you could also call it ethnic cleansing.  Or genocide.

There is that tired cliché: The winners write history.  Might makes write.  Well, yes, they do, but it is usually not very good and it is almost always incomplete.  If you have used Native America, or if you have managed to keep abreast of the massive literature in Native American Studies written by anthropologist, archaeologists, and historians, you will note that there are a wealth of sources that can be used to reconstruct native experiences during the Revolution. You can ignore them if you want when you commemorate acts of war, but we historians have a name for that, and we will judge you harshly if you do so.  We will judge you in the same way we judge those who continue to defend the racist monuments celebrating the Confederacy erected after the Civil War. Like them, you will be encouraging a history of erasure, one that conceals the misdeeds of the past, and obscures the sufferings of those who became the victims of history.  Good historians remember and understand that what some people choose to “commemorate,” others are compelled to mourn.

Current Events, History and Historians, Native Americans

We Need To Get Woody Guthrie Right, Now More Than Ever

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Every couple of months I read on Twitter another denunciation from someone in the Native American/Indigenous Studies community of Woody Guthrie’s famous song, “This Land is Your Land.” It’s a “obvs hella-colonial” song, the critique goes, because Guthrie’s claim that the entire continent “from California, to the New York Island” belonged to you and me ignored the original Native American owners of North America.  As such, Guthrie erased the reality of Native Americans’ antecedent claims to the continent and, in effect, whitewashed the long history of American Indian dispossession in the United States.

As scholars we need to counter the colonialist project of erasing native peoples and their histories from the land, but this critique of Guthrie is facile at best. Those who teach and write about Native American history, those of us who have worked with these communities in their present-day struggles to regain control of their ancestral lands, have bigger problems than a 75-year-old folk song.

Here are the full lyrics to the song:

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

Guthrie wrote the song after hearing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a patriotic anthem that borders on the jingoistic.  (If you want a song that celebrates an “America: Love It or Leave It” ethos, this ought to be your target). Guthrie wrote during a period in American history when the economy had failed catastrophically, where millions of people were out of work, and federal efforts to provide relief, recovery, and reform, as radical as they were for the time, did not fundamentally challenge the basic structures of American capitalism.

Guthrie stood against the injustices in American society, the exploitation of labor, the impoverishment of hard-working, ordinary people  He stood against the selfish rich, those who gamed a system already rigged in their favor.  This was protest music of the first order.

So, yeah, you can hate Guthrie’s lyrics if you want, but as scholars we have an obligation to read deeply, honestly, and thoroughly.  Unlike, say, Fox News, we are not allowed as scholars to take words out of context, not if we are to claim that we are hard-working, honest, and open-minded in our approach to the past.  And as citizens, we could use more voices like Guthrie’s, willing to denounce the injustices of a system that seems to spiral farther and farther away from its expressed highest ideals every day.