{"id":5032,"date":"2021-06-19T18:19:11","date_gmt":"2021-06-19T18:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=5032"},"modified":"2021-06-19T18:19:11","modified_gmt":"2021-06-19T18:19:11","slug":"history-as-end-matthew-karp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/19\/history-as-end-matthew-karp\/","title":{"rendered":"History As End, Matthew Karp"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thought-provoking essay on the limitations and weaknesses of current attempts to reimagine American history.<\/p>\n

Whatever birthday it chooses to commemorate, origins-obsessed history faces a debilitating intellectual problem: it cannot explain historical change. A triumphant celebration of 1776 as the basis of American freedom stumbles right out of the gate\u2014it cannot describe how this splendid new republic quickly became the largest slave society in the Western Hemisphere. A history that draws a straight line forward from 1619, meanwhile, cannot explain how that same American slave society was shattered at the peak of its wealth and power\u2014a process of emancipation whose rapidity, violence, and radicalism have been rivaled only by the Haitian Revolution. This approach to the past, as the scholar Steven Hahn has written, risks becoming a \u201chistory without history,\u201d deaf to shifts in power both loud and quiet. Thus it offers no way to understand either the fall of Richmond in 1865 or its symbolic echo in 2020, when an antiracist coalition emerged whose cultural and institutional strength reflects undeniable changes in American society. The 1619 Project may help explain the \u201cforces that led to the election of Donald Trump,\u201d as the Times executive editor Dean Baquet described its mission, but it cannot fathom the forces that led to Trump\u2019s defeat\u2014let alone its own Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n

The political limits of origins-centered history are just as striking. The theorist Wendy Brown once observed that at the end of the twentieth century liberals and Marxists alike had begun to lose faith in the future. Collectively, she wrote, left-leaning intellectuals had come to reject \u201ca historiography bound to a notion of progress,\u201d but had \u201ccoined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going.\u201d This predicament, Brown argued, could only be understood as a kind of trauma, an \u201cungrievable loss.\u201d On the liberal left, it expressed itself in a new \u201cmoralizing discourse\u201d that surrendered the promise of universal emancipation, while replacing a fight for the future with an intense focus on the past. The defining feature of this line of thought, she wrote, was an effort to hold \u201chistory responsible, even morally culpable, at the same time as it evinces a disbelief in history as a teleological force.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

An older tradition of left-wing American politics had much less trouble with this kind of historical thinking. Frederick Douglass plays little part in the 1619 Project, but he knew better than most that historical narratives matter in political struggles: they shape our sense of the terrain under our feet and the horizon in front of us; they frame our vision of what is possible. Douglass\u2019s famous speech about the Fourth of July came at a low ebb of the abolitionist movement, just after the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, appeared to remove the question of slavery from national politics for good. That made it all the more important for him to build an argument from history, drawing on the experience of the Revolution to insist that the United States belonged not to \u201cthe timid and the prudent,\u201d but to insurgents who \u201cpreferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage.\u201d Douglass\u2019s fight against antebellum timidity took courage and purpose from an understanding of history in which radical change was possible.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Douglass questioned the wisdom of any historical politics that undermined the prospects for present-day change. This did not imply a purely instrumental contempt for the past, in the manner of the Trumpian right, but rather reflected a clear-eyed determination to treat history not as scripture or DNA, but as a site of struggle. \u201cWe have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future,\u201d Douglass declared. \u201cTo all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

History As End, By Matthew Karp | Harper’s Magazine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thought-provoking essay on the limitations and weaknesses of current attempts to reimagine American history. Whatever birthday it chooses to commemorate, origins-obsessed history faces a debilitating intellectual problem: it cannot explain historical change. A triumphant celebration of 1776 as the basis of American freedom stumbles right out of the gate\u2014it cannot describe how this splendid new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1ja","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5034,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions\/5034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}