Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World by Eric Foner

From the Publisher

A thought-provoking new book from one of America's finest historians"History," wrote James Baldwin, "does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do." Rarely has Baldwin's insight been more forcefully confirmed than during the past few decades. History has become a matter of public controversy, as Americans clash over such things as museum presentations, the flying of the Confederate flag, or reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it'In Who Owns History?, Eric Foner proposes his answer to these and other questions about the historian's relationship to the world of the past and future. He reconsiders his own earlier ideas and those of the pathbreaking Richard Hofstadter. He also examines international changes during the past two decades--globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa--and their effects on historical consciousness. He concludes with considerations of the enduring, but often misunderstood, legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This is a provocative, even controversial, study of the reasons we care about history--or should.

Publishers Weekly

In this series of addresses and essays, many in print for the first time, one of America's preeminent historians does his profession proud. After discussing his own life history beginning with a New York leftist Jewish childhood, during which his family "discuss[ed] the intricacies of international relations and domestic politics over the dinner table" Foner (The Story of American Freedom), a professor at Columbia University, writes with erudition and clarity on a variety of historical subjects. At his best, he critically assesses the way American history and historians intersect. In an address he gave last year as president of the American Historical Association, he exhorted his colleagues to examine American history in an international context: "In a global age, the forever-unfinished story of American freedom must become a conversation with the entire world." His critique of Ken Burns's Civil War documentary shows how the much-acclaimed series by depicting the war as a fight between Northern and Southern whites and by essentially excluding the Reconstruction, one of Foner's own specialties exhibits some of the same failings that have plagued historians of the era (which Foner calls "the most controversial and misunderstood era in our nation's history"). Other strong essays include a lecture on blacks and the U.S. Constitution and an analysis of the way historians have looked at socialism in the United States. The essays on history in South Africa and Russia, while thought-provoking, feel a bit dated (they were written in the mid-1990s). But as whole, these writings help to debunk the idea that history is irrelevant in the 21st century. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

David M. Kennedy

"Eric Foner is rightly ranked among our era's most distinguished historians. In Who Owns History?, he takes on some of the most contentious issues in the American past, while candidly describing his own intellectual journeys, and often brilliantly illuminating the nature of the historian's craft."
—David M. Kennedy, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University

Michael Kammen

"Who Owns History? offers engaging essays that address significant issues in lucid prose accessible to the general reader as well as students and scholars. Above all, the book carries and conveys what I call 'moral weight,' which is one of Eric Foner's notable gifts as a historian."
—Michael Kammen, Cornell University

Joyce Appleby

"Who Owns History? introduces readers to one of the country's finest historians, Eric Foner, writing about issues more critical to American public life today than ever before."
—Joyce Appleby, UCLA

Library Journal

Each individual has a vested interest in knowing the past because the past is in everyone. However, "everyone and no one" owns the past and "the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery," states Foner (history, Columbia Univ.), author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution and other respected titles on American history. In nine readable essays written between 1983 and 2001 and grouped in three sections "The Politics of History and Historians," "Rethinking History in a Changing World," and "The Enduring Civil War" Foner argues that the historian has a relationship with his or her own world. His style is personable and straightforward, and he effectively presses home his assumptions. From a historian's perspective, though, he adds nothing new; the question "Who owns history?" has been around in various guises for 30 years, and Foner's variation simply restates the theme that academics must be community-oriented if only to stay in touch with the public. Perhaps a more pertinent question would be, "Who determines which history is `anointed' as the `true' history?" Nevertheless, Foner is a respected historian, and he ably articulates a viewpoint shared by many of his colleagues. Recommended for academic and large public libraries. Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

A series of nine previously published essays by historian Foner (Columbia U.) in which he reflects on his own career as a historian as well as on broader issues of how history is used and understood. Among the topics discussed are the cultural and historical determinants of what a historian chooses to study, the evolution of the idea of freedom as it relates to the U.S. and globalization, the treatment of the past in post-apartheid South Africa, the relative weakness of socialist movements in the United States, and Ken Burn's treatment of the Civil War. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Short essays by noted scholar Foner (The Story of American Freedom, 1998, etc.) on the role history has played in recent times, including his own. The intellectual currents of Foner's life serve as the basis for this collection. He discusses how he came to write his own version of American history; the role his mentor, Columbia professor Richard Hofstadter, played in his development as a scholar; and how his experiences working as a historian in the former Soviet Union shaped his recent thoughts on his discipline. Foner (History/Columbia Univ.) displays an amazing breadth of knowledge, but the real joy here is his accessibility. Anyone can read these pieces, written in clear, generous prose. The author seems aware that his interests and struggles are relatively narrow and that readers won't share them unless he writes without jargon or cant. As a result, even non-eggheads will care about Hofstadter's academic travails as presented by his affectionate former student. Left-leaning Foner devotes plenty of time to socialism, another potentially dreary subject here made engaging. His essay "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" may be the single best attempt to answer that question. In fact, like any good teacher, he winds up creating new questions instead of answering the old, ultimately rephrasing his query as "Does Socialism have a future in Europe?" Foner has teeth, too. He delivers a broadside to Ken Burns's television documentary The Civil War, contending that the director commits the most fatal error for a wannabe historian: instead of allowing the facts to build an argument, Foner writes, Burns's analysis "bears more resemblance to turn-of-century romantic nationalism thanto modern understandings of the war's complex and ambiguous consequences." A lucid antidote to the sensationalist histories currently in vogue.

What People Are Saying

David M. Kennedy
Eric Foner is rightly ranked among our era's most distinguished historians. In Who Owns History? he takes on some of the most contentious issues in the American past while candidly describing his own intellectual journeys, and often brilliantly illuminating the nature of the historian's craft. (David M. Kennedy, Stanford University)

Michael Kammen
Who Owns History? offers the reader engaging essays that address significant issues in lucid prose accessible to the general reader as well as students and scholars. Above all, the book carries and conveys what I call 'moral weight,' which is one of Eric Foner's notable gifts as a historian. (Michael Kammen, Cornell University)

Joyce Appleby
Who Owns History? introduces readers to one of the country's finest historians, Eric Foner, writing about issues more critical to American public life today than ever before. (Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles)

Product Details

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Table of Contents

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Rarely has Baldwin's insight been more forcefully confirmed than during the past decade. To the surprise of historians themselves, in the final years of the twentieth century and opening moments of the twenty-first, history seemed to enter into Americans' public and private consciousness more powerfully than at any time in recent memory. Our equivalent of what the British call the "heritage industry" reached unprecedented levels of popularity and profitability. Works focused on history regularly appeared on both fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists. Hollywood, for better or worse, churned out any number of historically oriented films, including Amistad, Gladiator, The Patriot, and Pearl Harbor. There was a spate of efforts to designate historic buildings like New York's Grand Central Terminal as landmarks, saving them from demolition, and to restore their architectural beauty. The History Channel emerged as one of the most successful enterprises on cable television. Attendance at historical museums and other venues for the public presentation of the past reached new heights. Corporations moved to cash in on Americans' fascination with history. Primedia, the magazine, video, and Internet conglomerate, began sponsoring reenactments of Civil War battles. "First and foremost we're trying to extend our brand into the Civil War category," a company spokesman told a reporter for The Washington Post.

This expanding popular fascination with the past coincided, sometimes uneasily, with a profound reorientation of historical scholarship. It has become almost a truism that the past thirty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion of the cast of characters included in historical narratives and the methods employed in historical analysis. Groups neglected by earlier scholars — African-Americans, women, working people, and others — have moved to center stage in accounts of the past, and the professorial itself has changed so that it more fully reflects the composition of American society. In eight years of undergraduate and graduate study at Columbia University during the 1960s, I never once was taught by a woman or non-white historian. Such an experience would be virtually impossible today.

The new scholarship began to produce a long-overdue diversification of public history. The Freedom Trail, a walking tour of monuments, buildings, and historical markers that has long been Boston's premier tourist attraction, has now been supplemented by a Women's History Trail", a Black Heritage Trail, and a guide to the city's gay and lesbian history. Civil rights tourism is a growing business in the South. North Carolina officials urge Americans to visit Greensboro, where the sit-ins began in 1960, to see where "four brave people refused to move" and thereby "moved an entire nation." The new Trail of Tears National Historic Trail (commemorating the forced removal of the Cherokee nation from their homes in the 1830s) has been warmly embraced by tourism-conscious town fathers in out-of-the-way places from Georgia to Oklahoma.

On the other hand, the rise of what used to be called the "new social history" has also produced expressions of concern about a fragmentation of scholarship and the difficulty of constructing coherent narratives of the past when historians focus on various groups' distinctive experiences. Practitioners of more traditional fields such as diplomatic, political, and business history have complained repeatedly of feeling marginalized in a profession where social and cultural studies are in the ascendancy. More interesting, in a way, is the gap between the thrust of contemporary scholarship and the hold that "conventional" subjects retain on the broad public interested in history. History best-sellers today deal with topics that would have been familiar decades ago: the founding fathers, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Civil War, World War II. The History Channel devotes infinitely more time to military history than to runaway slaves or fighters for women's suffrage. The two most popular exhibitions at the National Museum of American History in Washington are those on the presidency and first ladies.

There is nothing unusual or sinister in the fact that each generation rewrites history to suit its own needs, or about disagreements within the profession and among the public at large about how history should best be taught and studied. What was different in the 1990s was history's sudden emergence as a "wedge issue" in the so-called culture wars. During that decade, it sometimes seemed, one could scarcely open a newspaper without encountering bitter controversy over the teaching and presentation of the American past. One series of acrimonious disputes centered on whether the "new history" was producing an insufficiently uplifting version of the nation's development. The Columbus quincentennial of 1992 was all but ruined by debates over whether the anniversary of his "discovery" should be recalled as a source of national pride (the birth of a New World) or shame (the decimation of native populations and introduction of slavery). A planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb was denounced by veterans' groups for alleged pro-Japanese bias and for suggesting that the use of the weapon may not have been necessary. In the end, the museum was forced to remove virtually all historical material that was to have accompanied the display of the Enola Gay, the plane that bombed Hiroshima. Proposed national standards for the teaching of history were denounced by critics like Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, for devoting too much attention to obscure members of minority groups, slighting more prominent American leaders, and offering a "depressing" account of the nation's development. These debates achieved a remarkable level of vituperation and oversimplification. One letter to the editor likened the National History Standards to distortions of the past "developed in the councils of the Bolshevik and Nazi parties."

A second set of debates centered on the legacy of slavery and the Civil War. In an essay on historical consciousness, Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of "creative forgetfulness" — how the memory of some aspects of the past is predicated on amnesia about others. Slavery is a case in point. Nowhere is the gap between scholarly inquiry and public perceptions of history more stark. It is probably safe to say that the finest body of American historical writing to appear during the past thirty years has been produced by scholars of slavery and emancipation. This literature has not only established beyond question the centrality of slavery to the history of the United States but has refashioned our understanding of subjects ranging from colonial settlement to the American Revolution and the origins and consequences of the Civil War.

In public history, however, a large void still exists when it comes to slavery. To be sure, communities throughout the North have taken steps to identify and commemorate sites associated with the Underground Railroad, and a museum devoted to slavery and emancipation is being planned for Cincinnati. Visitors to the nation's capital, however, will find a national museum devoted to the Holocaust, funded annually with millions of taxpayer dollars, but almost nothing related to slavery. Tours of historic plantations in the South still largely sugarcoat the slave experience. Of the hundreds of Civil War monuments North and South, only a handful depict the 200,000 African-Americans who fought for the Union. Liverpool and Nantes, two European ports whose wealth derived from the slave trade, have hosted museum exhibits candidly depicting the role of slavery in their growth. No such exhibition has ever been mounted in New York City, which grew rich in the early nineteenth century marketing the products of slave labor.

Copyright (c) 2002 Eric Foner