Living Through History

The great historian of the American South C. Vann Woodward began his magisterial Origins of the New South with an epigraph from Arnold Toynbee. That future historian and philosopher of history recalled watching Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when he was 8 years old:

"I remember the atmosphere. It was: well, here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there -- forever! There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all that. I am sure, if I had been a small boy in New York in 1897 I should have felt the same. Of course, if I had been a small boy in 1897 in the Southern part of the United States, I should not have felt the same; I should then have known from my parents that history had happened to my people in my part of the world."

For many years, Americans took a holiday from history. The issues that preoccupied Americans were, with a few notable exceptions, trivial, while major developments -- such as the stagnation of family incomes, growing economic inequality, persistent racial disparities and even the rapid transformation of the composition of the population via immigration -- went largely ignored.

True, there were many headline-making events, but these seemed isolated, scattered, even random. War itself seemed remote, little more than televised entertainment. After all, the fighting was outsourced to volunteers. As for the bulk of the casualties, these belonged largely to “people of whom we know nothing.”

Now, for the first time in their lives, our students are living through history.

We usually think of history as the sum total of everything that occurred in the past. That’s certainly true.

But there’s another way to think about history, and that’s the way that Toynbee and Woodward thought about it: history consists of historical forces, processes, dynamics and developments that transform life as we know it.

To live through history isn’t simply to live through extraordinarily troubled times, a period of uncertainty, anxiety and unpredictability, transformation, and conflict, like our own. Nor is it merely to experience a period that the future will consider historically significant.

It’s finding ourselves entangled in forces larger than ourselves.

Epochal ideas and dynamic forces that were slowly and invisibly percolating beneath life’s surface suddenly rise up and transform our everyday existence. Events that seem to emerge out of the blue are in fact the product of long-standing developments. These include forest fires that result from human encroachment upon wilderness areas, poor forest management policies and climate change, and how American efforts to transplant foreign standards and practices into Afghanistan (as opposed to building upon indigenous values, beliefs and frames of reference) contributed to popular resistance against U.S.-led initiatives.

Colonialism, imperialism, industrialization, urbanization, decolonization -- these are just a few of those historical processes commonly taught in history classes. Individuals may or may not be aware of these processes as they are going on. But like earthquakes, these processes ultimately shake the earth and leave the landscape transformed.

The pandemic, the protests over racial disparities and gendered violence, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan have sparked a recognition that we, too, are caught up in history.

Our lives are being touched by far-reaching demographic, climatic, environmental and attitudinal and behavioral shifts that can’t be ignored. In short, we can’t escape our collective past or simply cultivate our own garden.

Even as we live through history, we also need to challenge our students to:

• Historicize the present. To appreciate the resemblances and contrasts between the present and the past and strive, as best we can, the significance of this historical moment.
• Lay bare the historical forces transforming our lives. We should recognize, as the U.S. Senator William H. Seward explained in his 1858 “Irrepressible Conflict” speech, that big events ought not be viewed simply as accidental, ephemeral or fortuitous, but are products of great forces that we need to identify and understand.
• Move past history. Past may be preface, but that doesn’t mean it’s determinative. We have the ability to move past history.

Perhaps you recall a famous passage from Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 speech at the Wisconsin State Fair and the sage advice the future president offered:

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- how consoling in the depths of affliction!”

Lincoln then went on to add, “And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”

Moving past history requires us to develop a positive vision of the future and to cultivate the sense of agency that might help us realize that vision.

Anyone over the age of 50 vividly remembers the earth-shattering events of 1989 that had the effect of (temporarily) of discrediting utopian dreams and paving the way for the triumph of a certain brand of neoliberalism and contributing to an illusion of American invincibility. Those days are over, and it is past time to reconsider our own recent past.

Among Sigmund Freud’s greatest insight was that the demons of the past haunt our personal present, and that the only way to overcome those demons was to bring them to consciousness.

I am convinced that history ought to serve a similar function: uncovering and then mastering those underlying historical forces that drive behavior whether we are conscious of them or not. Only then can we begin to free ourselves from the shackles that constrain our imagination and rationalize existing inequalities and inevitabilities.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.