"Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities."

April 22, 2009 9:04 AM

"Everyman His Own Historian" is the annual address Carl Becker, President of the American Historical Association, delivered on December 29, 1931. It's probably the best thing I've ever read about history, and I thought I'd share it. It's long, but full of lively examples; I'll never forget the image of twenty tons of coal sliding dustily through Mr. Everyman's cellar window. (Via Slawkenbergius's Tales, the brilliant blog of MeFi's own nasreddin.)
posted by languagehat (15 comments total)

A linguistic note: I was convinced that there was a typo or scanning error in the sentence "I have no quarrel with this so great concern with hoti's business," but it turns out that hoti is, in the OED's words, "An assertion, a fact; a statement introduced by ‘that’"—it's a borrowing of the Greek conjunction ὅτι [hóti] 'that, because.'
posted by languagehat at 9:07 AM on April 22, 2009

Oh good! Thanks for this.
posted by foxy_hedgehog at 9:12 AM on April 22, 2009

I remember reading somewhere that Becker was deathly afraid of public speaking and actually had the address delivered by proxy. I can't find the source now, though.
posted by nasreddin at 9:16 AM on April 22, 2009

This seems to me the kind of lecture whose reception would depend entirely on the delivery. The information found within is great, but it could be rather snoozy if delivered poorly.
posted by ocherdraco at 10:39 AM on April 22, 2009

I liked this, thanks, and interesting to read as background to Carr.
posted by Sova at 10:40 AM on April 22, 2009

Thanks for the post. Reminds me of my undergrad days. I'm a historian now.
posted by MarshallPoe at 11:10 AM on April 22, 2009

The history written by historians, like the history informally fashioned by Mr. Everyman, is thus a convenient blend of truth and fancy, of what we commonly distinguish as 'fact' and 'interpretation'.

Perhaps this point is obvious to historians, but I don't think it is obvious to the rest of us. In fact, I believe the average person considers written history to be an infallibly accurate recitation of facts as they transpired. Anything that colors or erodes that initial reading is considered suspect or subversive. In the common understanding of history there is one true history, and therefore everything that is not that history is therefore not true.

Furthermore, I find it problematic that historians' interpretation can become part of that history, but that simultaneously "we [historians] must adapt our knowledge to his necessities." This seems to presuppose either some consensus among historians or at least that the set of historians is small enough that each historian can influence the others output.

Absent this, I can't see how history doesn't devolve into a supermarket of interpretations out of which the everyman can choose a history that suits his assumptions, biases and prejudices. For some of us, Columbus discovered America. For others, the Vikings. For others still, the native Americans. As it turns out, it depends on the meaning of "discovered." But that is an argument/investigation that no one set out to have, and the tendency of historical debate generally to turn on issues of semantics or writing casts uncertainty over the whole enterprise, and calls all of it into question.

There are facts about the past that are unknowable in an of themselves, I suppose. There are myriad interpretations of those facts. If people will gravitate toward those interpretations which they are most comfortable with, what is the point?
posted by Pastabagel at 2:39 PM on April 22, 2009

Excellent post--thank you for sharing.

I think that the aforementioned point about history's components of truth and fancy is a good one. There is no one purely objective historical account of any event or experience, because human beings are not robots, and therefore, total objectivity is impossible. While there needs to be some kind of consensus as to which overriding account is most generally agreed-upon as being accurate, I can see the merit of adding more and more admittedly-subjective retellings from Everymen (and Everyladies!) to the cultural record to flesh history out. The stories that make it into history books obviously aren't always the whole story, and alternate viewpoints matter.
posted by sarabeth at 3:01 PM on April 22, 2009

If people will gravitate toward those interpretations which they are most comfortable with, what is the point?

Same point as a new staging of Hamlet, really.
posted by IndigoJones at 3:17 PM on April 22, 2009

the average person considers written history to be an infallibly accurate recitation

Well, the "average person" is itself a kind of mythic construct; easy to describe, difficult to find. Yet to assume for a moment that something like one exists, then I think a more charitable view of "everyman circa 2009" reveals that he/she is in fact acutely aware of the degree to which "history" is manipulated, full of interpretive bias, etc. Look for instance at the interest in conspiracies (which most people think is a horrendous, but I actually think is a good thing, at least in small doses, since it fosters the hermeneutics of suspicion), and the mistrust of the media. There's a reason Chomsky sells. Furthermore, the recent banking crisis has seriously ruptured a few well-worn cliches about class, and gotten people to see more clearly the plutocratic machinations at work in our society. So I'm not convinced the average joe is as oblivious to the inherent problems of historiography as you suppose. They may not suffer from the same degree of acute theoretical historical anxiety that professional historians do, and they may not know the root of historein is to inquire, but the days when everyone thought the textbook was the last word seem to have passed.
posted by ornate insect at 4:05 PM on April 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

If people will gravitate toward those interpretations which they are most comfortable with, what is the point?

People who prioritize genuine learning over confirming their existing assumptions get familiar with competing interpretations and synthesize the most compelling parts, in the process dropping whatever assumptions they learn to be factually indefensible. Ideally, they gain ever greater nuance, complexity, and balance in their views of how the world works and how people relate to each other.

But dropping the ego to that extent is difficult, so they're outnumbered by the people who simply gravitate toward interpretations that entrench their assumptions. What's the point, then? For one thing, adding to knowledge has its own rewards; for another, putting a new interpretation out there increases opportunities to engage with people who genuinely enjoy learning. In T. H. White's The Book of Merlyn, there's a few sentences that run something like, but more gracefully than, this: "Through the process of adding ideas to the world's reservoir of knowledge, the means of improvement is offered, for people to take from or reject, as they choose. That is the business of the philosopher, to increase his society's stock of ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people."

As for

I can't see how history doesn't devolve into a supermarket of interpretations out of which the everyman can choose a history that suits his assumptions, biases and prejudices,

this does happen. As far as I'm concerned, this could be discouraged if there was more of a bridge between academic historians and regular people. More efforts to diffuse the knowledge that academics take for granted, into the broader society through popular media, popular histories, and the use of accessible language. I'm of the same mind as Becker, who in the linked speech observes: "The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world." And that hypothetical bridge would also need more regular people making more of an effort to get acquainted with the basic history of a topic before presuming to pontificate about it. (I'm tilting at windmills again.)
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 10:04 PM on April 22, 2009

I assigned this in my graduate course on public history last quarter. The students enjoyed it but what jumped out at them was that Becker's "everyman" was not a working man, but an upper class person who can pay for a whole season of coal at a time.
posted by LarryC at 11:55 PM on April 22, 2009

Thanks for posting this languagehat! I happen to be living in a new residence at Cornell named after Carl Becker so it's certainly fitting. I find cybercoitus' quote about unread books particularly interesting. I often binge on random reading for pleasure from the library, generally non-fiction, and even here on Becker's old campus, I am struck how I usually feel like the only person who ever checks books out of the library. There's something to be said for the Everyman performing the simple act of sitting down and reading about something.
posted by zachlipton at 1:20 AM on April 23, 2009

LH: 'this so great concern with hoti's business' is a reference to Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral, which Becker obviously expected all his readers to recognise without being told:

He settled Hoti's business -- let it be! --
Properly based Oun --
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.

On the whole I approve of Becker's brisk pragmatism. However, I part company with him at the end of the lecture when he argues that the professional historian is the guardian of the collective memory, part of 'that ancient and honorable company of wise men of the tribe .. to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of the useful myths'. This is a playfully cynical pose, but it doesn't take us very far in understanding what historians do.

It's noticeable, too, that for all Becker's insistence that Mr Everyman and the professional historian are basically doing the same thing, he has some difficulty in explaining exactly what the professional historian can learn from Mr Everyman. When he tries to come up with practical examples of how the general public impose their version of history on the professional historian, he descends into banalities -- 'compelling us, in an age of political revolution, to see that history is past politics, in an age of social stress and conflict to search for the economic interpretation'. ('History is past politics' is a quotation from the Victorian historian E.A. Freeman -- another of those allusions that Becker expected his readers to recognise without being told.) Again this doesn't seem to bear much relation to what historians actually do.

Since Becker's time, of course, the expansion of higher education and the enormous growth of academic history have fundamentally altered the relationship between professional historians and the general public. So too has the emergence of the mass media as a filter between historians and their potential audience. So I'm not sure that Becker's notion of Mr Everyman really has much meaning any more -- the whole landscape has just changed so much.
posted by verstegan at 3:10 AM on April 23, 2009

'this so great concern with hoti's business' is a reference to Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral, which Becker obviously expected all his readers to recognise without being told

Thanks very much—I hate missing allusions!
posted by languagehat at 5:28 AM on April 23, 2009