Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.
Here is a taste of the interview:
A goal of your essays is “to explain how history works.” Can you give a couple of examples of how your essays reveal the historian’s work?
Nearly every essay in the collection originally appeared in The New Yorker. A few began as book reviews. That’s true of the essay about Plymouth and the Pilgrims, which started out as a review of Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2006 book, Mayflower but became a reflection on the work of Samuel Eliot Morison, the American historian who edited William Bradford’s journal. “Let the facts speak!” was Morison’s motto. He never met a footnote he didn’t like. Philbrick, like many popular historians who work outside the academy, dispenses with footnotes and is interested, above all, in letting his story speak. The difference between Morison and Philbrick -- their methods and arguments and especially their standards of evidence -- reveals a great deal, I think, about how historians work.
History, as I write in the book’s introduction, is the art of making an argument by telling a story. A story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. But, in the end, evidence is everything. One of the many essays in the book that didn’t start out as a book review is the essay about the Constitution. Instead, it’s a history of how the Constitution has been read over the centuries, not by lawyers or jurists or politicians but by everyone else. I wanted to explain the rise of what legal scholars call “popular constitutionalism.” I began with a question: when and why did “Read the Constitution” become a bumper sticker? I went to the archives to find out. Then I wrote an essay in which I tried to make an argument by telling a story about what I’d discovered. That might not be “how historians work,” but it’s how I work.
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