just damn wrong

[winterbadger]

I read this interesting piece in Foreign Affairs about the TV series Deadwood (why is a journal on foreign policy publishing editorials about television and 19th century American history? I have no effing clue). And it makes a number of good points. But one remark early in the piece set my blood boiling.

Of course, audiences should not expect Westerns to be lessons on how people cursed or dressed or died on the frontier. Imposing the rules of history on the genre would mire its grander themes in the mud of hardship and disappointment that covered ordinary life in the Old West.

I could not, without a great deal of time spent and hard work, have contrived a more foolish, wrong-headed, ignorant, preposterous, or self-hating piece of drivel. The writer is, apparently, a professor of history. If this is the state of history teaching in higher education in America, no wonder so few people find history interesting or bother learning it.

A huge part of history is *all about* how people cursed or dressed or died--in other words, how they lived. To think that this necessitates the obscuration of the grand themes of human existence, or that hardship and disappointment are not an important part of those grand themes is to demonstrate a breath-taking failure of imagination, of humanity, and of one's role as a professional historian. ETA: Actually, the more carefully I read this piece the worse it gets. Strawmen, poor factual accuracy, vague generalizations. *sigh*

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I can understand the statement in terms of the Western as a fictional genre that only bears a tangential relationship to actual history. Regency romances are, likewise, a genre with a passing relationship to history but no real foundation in it.

[winterbadger]

But that's pulp Western novels, and the author has already made the point that Deadwood (which is what she is writing about) is not really part of that genre.

Besides which, I know writers of Regency romances who go to great lengths to get historical detail right, to understand and portray the real lives people led, and I'm pretty sure that there are Western writers (or were--does anyone write them any more?) who do likewise. There's nothing that says genre writing has to be trash.

But the larger point is that she's implying that history is all mud and boredom and that it can't, by its nature, encompass anything above the mundane and ordinary. This is a kind of self-hating view of history that I see all too often among the less imaginative and, I have to assume, the less capable in the profession. It's a fundamental failure to grasp that one of the great purposes and values of the study of history is to tell stories, to help people see that the past is meaningful, that it has some relevance. That it is about real, actual people; like or unlike you or me, but people with dreams and aspirations, with experiences and feelings and a point of view that, if properly explored, maybe fascinating and lend us perspective on our own lives. That history is more than just a collection of statistics and trends that are only of interest to arcane scholars who spend all their time navel-gazing and arguing about pointless meta-criticism.