Michael Frisch's book A Shared Authority points out that by encouraging a more democratic approach to the telling of history, then both professional historians and the public can simultaneously particpate in how history is expressed.
One of the more interesting essays in this book is"Oral history and the presentation of class consciousness." It deals with The New York Times and how their editorial choices told a story of bluecollar angst when the oral histories of Buffalo, New York were, in actuality, more expressive of how unemployment affected all kinds of people at all stages of their lives. The histories also presented a narrative that was more general to the country, rather than specifically to the hardships of Buffalo alone. The point that Frisch makes here, and in last week's article, is that the presentations of oral histories are often enmeshed in presentations of power. The editors of the oral histories wanted to tell a specific story and used the resources to tell it rather than shaping a narrative around the documents presented. Frisch, just as Rose and Corley last week, argues that more democratic approaches to storytelling would result in richer, fuller, more complex histories.
However, maybe the editors didn't want a more complex history. They wanted something simple and, just as Corley and Rose accused Burns of doing, the editors found proof of their argument in the histories rather than finding an argument in the evidence. They would certainly get an A + in Bad History 101.
Some of Frisch's argument, while impressive for its time, feels stale in 2009. It seems that historians today are constantly trying to find more democratic approaches in their work and if they fail to do so it is one of the first criticisms that other academics will point out. Perhaps today's historians today have gotten more better about keeping other scholars accountable.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Filmmakers as Public Historians
Can a movie be accurate enough to please historians? This seems to be the thematic question asked by the majority of this week's readings regarding the interaction of history and Hollywood. That is simplifying the issue surely but certainly no more than how some historians accuse producers, directors, and screenwriters of downsizing historical events and people.
The articles from this week were motivated by the inclusion of filmmakers as public historians. Including the creators of movies into the realm as public historian is both exciting and frustrating. Some, like Toplin, find the medium of film as incredibly revealing about both and present and past cultures. Others find plenty to criticize.
The first to consider are documentaries. Frisch examines the oral histories in a PBS special on the Vietnam War experience. Rose and Corley research the documentaries made for PBS by Ken Burns. Both articles find documentaries lacking and for similar reasons: both Burns and the documentary on the War selectively choose what to present to the public which results in a less than honest depiction of history. Burns claims that he is compensating for poorly trained history teachers and he blurs the line between director and educator. Sometimes he seems to purposely be both and using either to support his goals of the moment. In this way the authors find him particularly dangerous to the public because he plays both sides of the coin and the authors seem to want him to fit neatly into either one category or the other.
Hollywood movies result in different analysis. In the article on Le Retour de Martine Guerre, the author Natalie Davis laments how her research on a 16th century French story resulted in a less than realistic understanding of peasant life. Her frustration of the style of trial shown in the movie did not lend itself to sympathetic ears. Without the filmmakers ability to account for their actions the debate is one sided. The directors expressed sincerity at including Davis and used her counsel regularly throughout the film process. Perhaps the choice in a public trial had to do with other things, like making the judges less of the villian that private trials would certainly have implied. Davis critiques the directors anachronistic choices without accounting for the development of plot and narrative functions (symbolism, simile, metaphor, etc).
Toplin's conclusions are different. He understands artistic license and expects less historical accuracy because he sees the movies as products of the present rather than exploration of the past. Toplin's article is the most interesting because he evaluates movies much as other texts from the class have evaluated museum exhibits. By allowing movies to speak about the present instead of criticizing every mistake, the films could become more valuable to historians. Contextualizing the time that the movies were made could yield much to to cultural and social historians.
When it comes to film, be they blockbusters or PBS specials, the public and historians should take what they can and discard the rest. It is plausible that more should be expected from documentaries but when profit is the motive than is is understandable that people would make something that would sell to investors and an audience. Burns is backed by General Motors. If he failed to make things that did well than he might lose funding. The reality of having millions of dollars pulled from projects is something that few professors will ever have to face, until then maybe we should cut them some slack.
Winston Churchill once said "the farther back you look, the further forward you will see."
The articles from this week were motivated by the inclusion of filmmakers as public historians. Including the creators of movies into the realm as public historian is both exciting and frustrating. Some, like Toplin, find the medium of film as incredibly revealing about both and present and past cultures. Others find plenty to criticize.
The first to consider are documentaries. Frisch examines the oral histories in a PBS special on the Vietnam War experience. Rose and Corley research the documentaries made for PBS by Ken Burns. Both articles find documentaries lacking and for similar reasons: both Burns and the documentary on the War selectively choose what to present to the public which results in a less than honest depiction of history. Burns claims that he is compensating for poorly trained history teachers and he blurs the line between director and educator. Sometimes he seems to purposely be both and using either to support his goals of the moment. In this way the authors find him particularly dangerous to the public because he plays both sides of the coin and the authors seem to want him to fit neatly into either one category or the other.
Hollywood movies result in different analysis. In the article on Le Retour de Martine Guerre, the author Natalie Davis laments how her research on a 16th century French story resulted in a less than realistic understanding of peasant life. Her frustration of the style of trial shown in the movie did not lend itself to sympathetic ears. Without the filmmakers ability to account for their actions the debate is one sided. The directors expressed sincerity at including Davis and used her counsel regularly throughout the film process. Perhaps the choice in a public trial had to do with other things, like making the judges less of the villian that private trials would certainly have implied. Davis critiques the directors anachronistic choices without accounting for the development of plot and narrative functions (symbolism, simile, metaphor, etc).
Toplin's conclusions are different. He understands artistic license and expects less historical accuracy because he sees the movies as products of the present rather than exploration of the past. Toplin's article is the most interesting because he evaluates movies much as other texts from the class have evaluated museum exhibits. By allowing movies to speak about the present instead of criticizing every mistake, the films could become more valuable to historians. Contextualizing the time that the movies were made could yield much to to cultural and social historians.
When it comes to film, be they blockbusters or PBS specials, the public and historians should take what they can and discard the rest. It is plausible that more should be expected from documentaries but when profit is the motive than is is understandable that people would make something that would sell to investors and an audience. Burns is backed by General Motors. If he failed to make things that did well than he might lose funding. The reality of having millions of dollars pulled from projects is something that few professors will ever have to face, until then maybe we should cut them some slack.
Winston Churchill once said "the farther back you look, the further forward you will see."
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Hard Times and Oral Histories
This week's reading was a collection of oral histories, taken by Studs Terkel in his book Hard Times. The histories were taken from a variety of people who lived during the Great Depression as well as young adults, growing up in the late 20th century, and how they understood the Depression, if at all.
Oral history is a funny thing. It feels more permanent than a conversation but less reliable. It is, after all, a memory and we all know how fuzzy they can be. In class it was discussed that the reliability of the memory is not at all detracting from a historian's work; that the feelings and emotions evoked were what was important. These feelings are what make oral histories so useful.
However, the real bugger of this topic is accuracy. In class it was discussed that with the rise of literacy and the believed permanencec of printed documents that these documents were somehow more reliable, more evidentiary, more accurate, and more Truthful than anything else. Historians and archivists held on to diaries and newspapers and receipts, as well as photos, advertisements, film reels, and anything else from the time as somehow more honest and accurate than other sources. What were these other sources? They aren't always described but the point here is that if it was printed on paper than it was taken as somehow more accountable for historic study than living people's memories.
It seems problematic to argue that something taken from the past is somehow more accurate than anything else. The argument here is about perspective. All of these materials are equally honest because they are all the subjective truths of the person who writes them or emits them. They are neither more or less honest than other documents- what matters is that they are true to them. Accuracy in any source is not the point because historians may never get to that material.
It is somehow flawed to argue that oral history is legitimate because it evokes memories and feelings and that accuracy is somehow unimportant. Oral history is legitimate because it is history. Accuracy is something that no written or oral document can produce because all of it is truthful to the person associated with it and one can be neither more or less accurate than the other. Whether it is contemporary or removed by decades does not matter because neither can be held acccountable as being more accurate than the other. What about documents of numbers? Surely numbers are more accurate but censuses are lost, people lie, estimates are made. Numbers provide a level of accuracy about certain experiences but even they only seem to marginally increase information.
It is interesting that Hard Times evoked such feelings. It certainly was unexpected.
Oral history is a funny thing. It feels more permanent than a conversation but less reliable. It is, after all, a memory and we all know how fuzzy they can be. In class it was discussed that the reliability of the memory is not at all detracting from a historian's work; that the feelings and emotions evoked were what was important. These feelings are what make oral histories so useful.
However, the real bugger of this topic is accuracy. In class it was discussed that with the rise of literacy and the believed permanencec of printed documents that these documents were somehow more reliable, more evidentiary, more accurate, and more Truthful than anything else. Historians and archivists held on to diaries and newspapers and receipts, as well as photos, advertisements, film reels, and anything else from the time as somehow more honest and accurate than other sources. What were these other sources? They aren't always described but the point here is that if it was printed on paper than it was taken as somehow more accountable for historic study than living people's memories.
It seems problematic to argue that something taken from the past is somehow more accurate than anything else. The argument here is about perspective. All of these materials are equally honest because they are all the subjective truths of the person who writes them or emits them. They are neither more or less honest than other documents- what matters is that they are true to them. Accuracy in any source is not the point because historians may never get to that material.
It is somehow flawed to argue that oral history is legitimate because it evokes memories and feelings and that accuracy is somehow unimportant. Oral history is legitimate because it is history. Accuracy is something that no written or oral document can produce because all of it is truthful to the person associated with it and one can be neither more or less accurate than the other. Whether it is contemporary or removed by decades does not matter because neither can be held acccountable as being more accurate than the other. What about documents of numbers? Surely numbers are more accurate but censuses are lost, people lie, estimates are made. Numbers provide a level of accuracy about certain experiences but even they only seem to marginally increase information.
It is interesting that Hard Times evoked such feelings. It certainly was unexpected.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Archive Stories
The anthology Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette Burton, attempts to contextualize the archive not only as a space for primary sources but also as a historical player as well; an actor in the discipline of history that participates in the making of history as much as scholars and those studied. The work is ambitious but overwhelmingly effective. Archive Stories uses Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon to argue that the archive is a place that constructs (and now deconstructs) power. The essays “attempt to denaturalize the presumptive boundaries of official archive space, historicize the production… of archives, and point to contemporary political consequences” of the archive (6).
One of the more interesting chapters on the ephemeral qualities of some archives is Renee Sentilles’ chapter on the use of the World Wide Web as archive. Her analysis is that almost every website is, in its own way, an archive. Simple searches through Google resulted in an ever-changing number of “hits” depending on the day she searched. The author struggled with the lack of accountability on the Internet; she repeatedly found mistruths and myths reported as certainties, without any attempt at noting the sources. This section had a particular effect on the reader. Each week the students in this class blog about their reactions to books; when the class is over, will there continue to be a record of discussions? All one has to do is delete the blog and it is as if the entire thing never happened. While at the beginning of the semester the blog idea seemed to provide a level of permanence, it now resembles a mist in the air- over in mere moments and easily replaced the next day.
As a graduate student in the 21st century, what Sentilles said about the usefulness of the Internet is interesting. She argues that the Web leads to research but cannot be an effective replacement for research in the traditional archive. An analogy of this would be the library online card catalogue: it can be searched but most materials are missed until someone looks in the stacks. In an age where things can be digitized and scanned, does the Internet offer more or less permanence to historical record? It certainly adds to the ever increasing scope of the record but as anyone who has ever experienced spontaneous computer failure knows, everything can be gone in a moment without the slightest chance of being returned. This is all rather cynical. Afterall, the Internet and digital archives in temporary existence are better than never having been, but while an improvement they are not a replacement. Digital archives do not yield the same tangible results or emotions in a person that the material histories do. Sentilles said it best: “virtual archives will never serve as more than a place to begin and end the research journey; never as a place to dwell,” (155).
One of the more interesting chapters on the ephemeral qualities of some archives is Renee Sentilles’ chapter on the use of the World Wide Web as archive. Her analysis is that almost every website is, in its own way, an archive. Simple searches through Google resulted in an ever-changing number of “hits” depending on the day she searched. The author struggled with the lack of accountability on the Internet; she repeatedly found mistruths and myths reported as certainties, without any attempt at noting the sources. This section had a particular effect on the reader. Each week the students in this class blog about their reactions to books; when the class is over, will there continue to be a record of discussions? All one has to do is delete the blog and it is as if the entire thing never happened. While at the beginning of the semester the blog idea seemed to provide a level of permanence, it now resembles a mist in the air- over in mere moments and easily replaced the next day.
As a graduate student in the 21st century, what Sentilles said about the usefulness of the Internet is interesting. She argues that the Web leads to research but cannot be an effective replacement for research in the traditional archive. An analogy of this would be the library online card catalogue: it can be searched but most materials are missed until someone looks in the stacks. In an age where things can be digitized and scanned, does the Internet offer more or less permanence to historical record? It certainly adds to the ever increasing scope of the record but as anyone who has ever experienced spontaneous computer failure knows, everything can be gone in a moment without the slightest chance of being returned. This is all rather cynical. Afterall, the Internet and digital archives in temporary existence are better than never having been, but while an improvement they are not a replacement. Digital archives do not yield the same tangible results or emotions in a person that the material histories do. Sentilles said it best: “virtual archives will never serve as more than a place to begin and end the research journey; never as a place to dwell,” (155).
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
