The practice of history,or why I'm not an historian but I am

Sep 29, 2023

As a Black child growing up in a segregated community (my neighborhood was Black, Chicano/Mexican American, and several Japanese families), I had three dreams: to be a doctor, to learn everything I could about everything (“history”), and to write stories. The sight of someone’s bleeding cured me of a career in medicine. I’ve remained consistent in my passion to learn history and write stories about history, or if I’m being “honest”—to write histories. The idea of becoming an historian appealed to me so much when I entered my undergraduate years I planned on becoming an historian. I took an early modern history, a historical moment I’ve always been drawn to, and because the professor was attractive enough to keep one’s attention but not too attractive to distract (I was youngish).

This class, probably unbeknownst to the professor, altered my trajectory. Not away from the study of early modern history but toward a discipline where I could do more than document a society’s institutions, politics, “important” figures, and relations with other social entities. Where I didn’t have to shed my “interpretive skin” for the sake of objectivity, of writing the “truth.” Where interpretation and objectivity (if there is such a thing) aren’t mutually exclusive. Where monolingual thoughts and assumptions about events, persons, and nations weren't always accepted as gospel.

I have always been a “why” person, especially in relation to early modern historiography about the past and usually the subject in some of my favorite romances. Why was the capture of Jerusalem crucial to the Christians (Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered)? Why did Europeans pretend that they were the only culture to have access to Greek and Roman historiography, philosophy, and literature (translations of the Aethiopica)? And why is “inferiority” the go to term for Christian Europe when it came to engaging with non-European cultures (The Faerie Queene or Orlando Furioso)? Of course, I was advised to set aside the why questions for the “who, what, and how” questions in my history class (the curse of taking literature classes alongside history classes). It was: “Just the facts, Ma’am. Just the facts. Tell me about the internecine struggles between the Plantagenets, the de Medici. England and France’s wars, the struggle to control the Vatican, and Henry VIII’s severing ties with the Vatican.”

African, Asian, and American histories were irrelevant (as far as I could tell during my undergraduate years) to the dynastic in-fighting and imperial fights among European nations. Even now, the dominant historical discourse in academia is Eurocentric and colonialist.

I was never comfortable with just the facts. I was driven to explore the why, which meant I had to raise questions about “voice”—who’s telling the facts, writing or speaking the history. Why this particular version of “history” and its facts? Why might the opposition (Muslims, Africans, Asians, and Americans) cackle at the European writing of “history?” While these queries and many others plagued me (for most of my reading/thinking life), it didn’t take me long to figure out that history as it was practiced in academia wasn’t entirely conducive to my somewhat chaotic mode of thinking. I tend to meander, wander, digress, muse, and just ask why.

The transition to literature was easy, and although I missed reading the details of events, social systems, and the historical players, I faced less resistance to my messy threading of social/cultural contexts and questions of interpretation. My academic training was a combination of “literary  history” (i.e., the focus the circulation of literature through translations, adaptations, and appropriations) and the “close reading” of a literary text that insisted on careful attention to language, structure, and meaning (interpretation). Not surprising, I found my path to “why” less strewn with the obstacles of “evidence” and data, although not absolutely defined by either methodology. It was in graduate school where I discovered myself a messy student of history—an historian, and not an historian.

I studied literature as history, possessed of social, political, cultural, and economic genomes that defined the historia being told. I studied historical texts, documents, letters, etc as literary artifacts leaking the effects of metaphor, tropes, fantasy, imagined worlds mapped human imagination. Crucially, I gave myself permission to think about history from my subjectivity, as a Black woman, living in the United States in the 20th century, and whose historical subjectivity was very much shaped by the histories I studied.

I practiced the craft of historiography: sliding into the archives to see what I could see, studying the “facts” but through a different lens, situating literary culture at the center rather than the margins of history, and reminding myself that history is a mental exercise in fabrication since the historian is the maker of history drawn from the scrapes of paper, the imprint of the past and the present that represents “evidence.” Always the belief that the “evidence” is factual, true, authentic, and absolute.

Not until I spent time with Hayden White, in conversation and reading his work, did I find my thoughts so succinctly stated:

Most immediately it has to do with the fact that the term “history” is the signifier of a concept rather than a reference to a thing or domain of being having material presence. This concept may have as its signified either “the past” or something like “temporal process” but these, too, are concepts rather than things. Neither has material presence. Both are known only by way of “traces” or material entities which indicate not so much what the things that produced them were, as, rather, the fact that “something” passed by a certain place or did something in that place. What it was that had passed by or what it had done in that place will remain a mystery, the solution to which may be inferred or intuited, but the nature of which must remain conjectural—indeed, must remain a possibility only and therefore a “fiction. (White, The Practical Past  2014)

Put more directly, the singular difference between history and literary fiction, as an fiction author rightly asserted, is the awareness among writers of literary fiction that they deliberately are fabricating truths—in other words, telling lies.

I am an historian and not an historian. I see archives as repositories of reflections, perceptions, assumptions, and wishes. Not facts. What is contained in archives is very much a shaping fantasy. Of a world we can never empirically know, no matter how much we seek to make it so. Reading an archival paper, we can only bear witness to the tale being told, not the tales omitted. For this reason, we should remind ourselves the hand that inscribed the historical document—the letter, the account book, the report, treaty, the laws—was neither objective nor infallible because it was human.

I’d like to say it was romance and early modern English drama that seduced me to the literary side, but alas it was the rejection of “presentism” (i.e., attention to the “whys” of early modern racial capitalism and its cultural artifacts and the foundation laid for a system of white supremacy that used whatever was handy—literature, visual and performative art, politics, theology, philosophy, and social institutions—to further its cause well into the 21st century). It was the “why” that led me to interpret the how, the what, and the who in an effort to find answers.

Never comfortable with “just the facts,” whether in a history class or a literature course where the idea of a “close reading” (focus on the text only, ignore the context of its origins) is an approximation of “just the facts”, I cannot imagine the study of a Shakespearean text or an early modern romance without the histories that fostered the authorial imagination. Histories are deeply imbued in racism, racecraft, sexism, and political and social hegemony and to ignore these facts (a state of mind I was encouraged to possess as an undergraduate/graduate student), as often is the case even in the 21st century, is in no way objective.

And thus dear reader, I chose subjectivity, to become an historian and a non-historian, to muse on history the same way I muse on literature. To know the archives (so crucial to historiography/the practice of history) not only favor the maker’s voice/pen but also occlude voices deemed not to possess “History”; my writerly job is to make known those voices and their histories. I do this in my academic writing on early modern literary texts and English society/culture. More importantly, I make these voices known in my historical romance fiction writing.

To quote the contemporary musicians Paramore: “ain’t it fun!”

Thanks for reading. MargoH

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© 2024 Margo Hendricks