Reflection by Caly McCarthy

I found Gaddis’ commentary on history as a tool of liberation to be the most significant part of his concluding chapter.  I find it compelling because it offers a “so what?” to the entire discipline of history.  Certainly history is interesting, but is it meaningful beyond the ivory tower?  According to Gaddis, it most definitely can be.

History is not a list of names and dates.  It is not merely chronology.  It often examines causality and implications – certainly more relevant, but significant?  I think that history is a powerful tool to challenge oppression, both subtle and overt.  When leaders harken back to a rosier past, historians have the capacity to break apart monoliths and represent a more nuanced understanding, speaking up for those who did not enjoy the projected past experience.  When those in power legitimize their harmful actions with the logic that “it’s always been this way,” historians can demonstrate that very little has “always been.”  This observation opens up space for different expressions of gender, beauty, family life, leadership styles, economic systems, etc.

Perhaps Gaddis says it best when he quips that “the sources of oppression are lodged in time and are not independent of time” (146).  Unlike the molecules that natural scientists are inclined to study, humans do not act in predictable manners.  Although this is frustrating to social scientists who seek clear causation to aid predictive models, this should be understood as a sign of hope; humans have the capacity change, and historians have the ability to help them recognize that.

In Gaddis’ chapter, “Seeing like a Historian”, Gaddis brings up the interesting question of representation. He talks about how historians’ own perspective and how they can alter the history. The most interesting part that I took from the reading was the discussion of whether freedom could exist without oppression. This really made me think about it in a way I never thought. I always thought of those items as different entities, but without each other what would the other even be. That is when seeing as a historian comes into play. For me I take events and make a conclusion based on common thoughts about that event. But what I must transform into is taking an event and understanding that many different actions can lead to an event and there might be many answers not just one overarching conclusion that makes looking at a certain event easy. This is how the freedom and oppression come into play. It is easy to say you know what freedom is but when you really think about freedom is what we think it is because we are all we have to base it off of. We must look at the different levels of freedom and not just ask do you have freedom or not.

In Gaddis’ final chapter, “Seeing Like a Historian” he proposes that the historian plays the role of “oppressor” when writing history and that the historians biggest fear is the resurrection of their historical subjects from the dead and their critique of the Historians interpretation of their reality; is to me, an interesting concept and an important one. In class we have spoken about the role of presentism in historical analysis and how modern ideas and perspectives can be carried over by an author into their interpretation of the past and distort it. Gaddis maintains that this process is not always purposeful but rather inevitable and a part of human nature. He goes on to say that history is only a representation of reality much in the same way a map is only a representation of geography and that over time these representations become reality. Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities explore this concept on a grander scale by showing how the modern emergence of the nation state led to the concept of nationalism and Imagined Communities. According to Anderson, a nation is an imagined community because it is socially constructed by people living and participating in a society who perceive themselves as part of a homogeneous group different from that of other human beings although they have no personal bond and face-to-face communication with other members of their society in order to maintain the function of said society – the perceived boundaries between them and other nations are largely illusory. This process of representations becoming reality and the creation of constructed memories, as Gaddis put it, are the way humans come to terms with and cope with the past. Furthermore, these constructed memories can also serve a positive function. “We liberate the ones that have from their self-proclaimed grandiosity: we try not to confuse how they wanted to be seen with who they actually were. And we try to free those who left no monuments from the resulting silences, whether imposed upon them by others, or by themselves” (140). The duality of historian as oppressor and liberator and the largely unconscious process behind it is an important thought to keep in mind when interpreting the historical work of ourselves and others as well as the reality of everyday life.