The changes in the practice of history, in regard to how historians approach and understand the past, have come from many directions, producing new theories and new perspectives of not only what has happened, but also what history is. Over time, these changes moved history out of the realm of antiquarianism and gave historical research a purpose; with each new theory and methodology our understanding of the past gains new perspectives and creates inclusive dialogue in our society.
HISTORICAL METHODS: HISTORIOGRAPHY
The changes in the practice of history, in regard to how historians approach and understand the past, have come from many directions, producing new theories and new perspectives of not only what has happened, but also what history is. Over time, these changes moved history out of the realm of antiquarianism and gave historical research a purpose; with each new theory and methodology our understanding of the past gains new perspectives and creates inclusive dialogue in our society.
The history of studying history spans from Herodotus in ancient Greece, though Karl Marx’s groundbreaking theories and ideas, into the present day where debates about methodology, purpose, and truth persist. As the study of history was born, historiography evolved from deciphering between myth and fact, to Christian ideology and the question of a guiding world spirit, to pragmatic uses and questions such as “does history repeat itself, and can we use practical knowledge of the past for future reference?” As historical research became institutionalized over the millennia, and transformed into a respectable field of study, it needed to find a method based on evidence and sound physical proof to become grounded as a science and leave the realm of hypotheticals and unsupportable observances.
Karl Marx brought revolutionary ideas to the study of history. With his theories, Marx rejected the idea of a world spirit guiding human progress through time. He rejected non-material concepts like the idea that history was a timeline between Creation and Revelations, or that culture is the driving force of history, instead focusing on the human relationship with production and consumption. With Marxist historical theory, history was perceived and viewed in stages based on growing materialism and the changing needs and demands of production and labor. This could be traced back to the survival needs of hunter-gatherers, to the sustainability needs of early farmers, all the way to the capitalist consumer climate of the Industrial Revolution and its world economy. Essentially, Marx’s theories placed human development in the hands of humans, taking it away from non-physical concepts. Using production as a scope in Marx’s framework of historical theory provided historians and researchers with a visible and physical constant from which the past was viewable. By examining the physical materials and goods leftover from history and past civilizations, we can gain knowledge of their daily lives, needs, as well as dead cultures in a way that written and oral description could only graze.1
In addition to the scope that Marx provides into the past, his theories also predict the direction that humanity will move in the future, or at least declare the desired direction where Marx thinks it should go. As the laborers and common working-class citizens become more and more conscious of the economy, the many laborers who hold so little power will come into conflict with the productive force that lies in the hands of the few and the elite, creating an emergency and sparking a new revolution.2
While Marx’s theories are revolutionary in their approach to studying the past, and they provide historians with the ability to test theories in a historical setting through physical products, they fail to largely take into consideration the immense power of the role of culture in society. The non-material aspects of society that Marx was attempting to overshoot are very largely attributed to the authority of the elites. Other areas of his historical framework begin to unravel once given closer inspection: the concept that history is a progressive path toward a proverbial workers-paradise seems lost when one considers catastrophes like the Second World War. Additionally, Marx only considers the stratification of classes in labor and production in his theories, he largely fails to consider the expanded scope of race, religion, and sexuality in the historical process.3
While many historians of the 20th-century have turned away from Marx’s theories, choosing to reject his concept of process, his ideas were groundbreaking and inspirational for many. Neo-Marxists, such as David Roediger, created a foundation from Marx’s theories, but expanded where Marx fell short regarding race and gender. Roediger attributes much of his own study of labor and history to Marx, but realized it had its shortcomings early on, stating:
“the Marxist tradition has furnished most of the intellectual tools I use, but in the main, it has not led me to press for answers to the question of why the white working class settles for being white. In my view, no answer to the 'white problem' can ignore the explanatory power of historical materialism, but neither does Marxism, as presently theorized, consistently help us focus on the central issue of why so many workers define themselves as white.”4
Roeidger was unsatisfied with the way that Marx and Marxists prioritized class over race as having “greater political importance.”5 Class was considered by Marxists to be the only lens from which history could be viewed, while race and gender were aspects to be overlooked, as they distorted the true picture. Even when Marxism considered race and racism in relation to labor and classes, it only focused on the roles of the ruling-classes in creating and perpetuating those tendencies. Marxism overlooks the contributions of the working-classes, who would accept “whiteness” as a wage in place of legal tender just to create a greater distinction between their free-labor and the slave-labor of African Americans.6
Adding further critique of Marx’s narrow scope of labor and history, the feminist movements of the 20th-century sparked the establishment of women’s studies and Joan Scott’s composite gender studies. As more diverse groups and historians and historical societies began to contribute to historiography, gaps in the historical narrative and our ability to know the past began to emerge. Scott argued that the “inequalities of power (in history) are organized along at least three axes,” those of class, race, and gender.7 It was with gender, and its interconnected link to sexuality, that Scott continued to expand the scope of historical study, but with this new area of historical study and expanded scope, came new complications. Scott created a complex definition of gender that is not centered on physical differences but tied to social relationships and roles, sparking debate not just about how gender should be studied, but what it is and what its purpose was. Scott herself believed that the purpose of gender studies was to:
“provide new perspectives to old questions like how political rule is imposed and what is the true impact of war on society, redefine old questions with new terms with the consideration of family and sexuality in economics and war, and make women visible and active participants of the past.”8
But does using the term “gender” in place of “women” imply that men and women experienced history in shared spheres? Does “gender” carry the weight of the inequalities between men and women in historical settings? How does it interact with the concept of gender binaries? Afsaneh Najmabadi argues that Joan Scott’s work in gender studies is largely based around the assumption that the modern Anglo-American definitions of gender and sexuality are shared globally, and fails to take into consideration that our modern understanding and concepts are not necessarily reflective of those of our ancestors.9
The modern Anglo-American concept of gender and its “connection to birth and psycho-behavioral categories of gender role determination” create a binary that Najmabadi and others argue should be done away with in historical research.10 In support of this opinion, Najmabadi cites the historical Iranian concept of beauty and gender, stating that during the Qajar period that a beautiful face could be the feature of either a male or female. In detail, she states:
“I realized, for instance, that my association of beautiful faces with femininity and femaleness did not correspond to nineteenth-century Qajar sensibilities. In the Qajar period, a beautiful face could be either a young male or female with identical features. This recognition was not an incidental and localized trouble. Sexuality and masculinity crept in as haunting afterthoughts in several chapters of the book. As I had set about to read Iran’s “long nineteenth century” as a century centrally shaped by the transformation of gender, I had overlooked how this had depended on the transformation of sexuality.”11
Mary Poovey’s texts further highlight the significance of how gender and gender relations have been perceived over time and space in relation to the modern Anglo-American interpretation. She does this by describing how the social organization of mid-Victorian England evolved from secular and religious institutions in opposition to previous social relationships.12
Continuing to complicate the study of gender, Poovey delves into the concept of separate spheres of experience by pointing out the interconnected relationship of male and female labor in Victorian England: unmarried women were a prospering demographic, leaving the roles of wives and motherhood to join the workforce, contributing to the labor and class dynamic of society. She continues to add to the conversation by arguing against the term “gender” not being connected to sex or sexuality, noting that a woman’s child-bearing capacity and the scrutiny of male sexual were important factors that contributed to the ideal image of Victorian women, domestic life, and the British nationality.13
Moving beyond Marx, class, race, and gender, historians of the 20th and 21st-centuries began to look at social history, regarding the macro-process of history and engaging the formal rules of society in the historical process. This period is highlighted by the desire to seek total history, interdisciplinary research, and build off the three axes of power and multiple points of view to create personal distance in the historical narrative. Most recently, this new social history and the cultural turn have continued to add to historiography and further the debate amongst historians about the role and plausibility of studying history.
By utilizing interdisciplinary approaches to research, and attempting liberate research from historical frameworks, historians of the cultural turn have tried to remove restrains and fill in hypothetical and theoretical approaches to history. In doing so, many adopted the practices of other sciences and disciplines. In his research of New England history, William Cronon uses environmental history as a scope into the past lives of New England’s inhabitants: northern tribes, southern tribes, and colonists. By using environmental history, the land, flora and fauna, as well as biotic footprints in the soil to paint a picture of New England’s history, Cronon attempts to distance himself from man-made constructs and potential areas of bias.14
Cronon exemplifies the new social history in Changes in the Land. While his research is centered on environmental history, Cronon details how the societies and cultures of different groups had different ecological impacts, and how these aspects of their lives are reflected in the altered environment and landscapes. The southern New England tribes farmed and hunted seasonally based on natural resources and land availability. These migratory southern peoples saw no need for food surplus as that required more work than necessary for survival, leaving fields not overworked and using forest to their advantages in creating new nutrient-rich clearings. Native Americans in northern New England, notably Maine, were primarily hunters, meaning they let little mark on the landscape in terms of agriculture and floral distribution, subsiding off of abundant fauna in spring, while struggling through the winter.15 When European colonists arrived in the region, they established crop-specific fields and altered the land as their society changed from survival-based subsistence, to economically-conscious traders. They further adapted into private-property landowners in growing communities, to territorial expansion for wealth and status. All of these facets of their society were reflected in the environmental history of New England.16
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1 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994): preface. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
2 Marx, “Preface to A Contribution,” preface.
3 Marx, “Preface to A Contribution,” pp. preface.
4 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007.): 6.
5 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, introduction.
6 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 20.
7 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986): 1053-1075.
8 Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” 1053-1075.
9 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Historical Analysis?” Journal of Women's History 18, no. 1 (2006): 11-21.
10 Najmabadi, “Beyond the Americas,” 11-21.
11 Najmabadi, “Beyond the Americas,” 11-21.
12 Mary Poovey, "The Ideological Work of Gender," in Uneven Developments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988): 1-23.
13 Poovey, "The Ideological Work of Gender," 1-23.
14 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003): preface.
15 Cronon, Changes in the Land, 38-40.
16 Cronon, Changes in the Land, 69-71.
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