History and Historiography

YOU MIGHT WONDER why we're taking a detour into history. After all, we're calling this book a "user's guide," but a user's guide is something you can pull out, looking for help, when you are trying to do something in the here and now. History, on the other hand, offers stories about things that have already been done in the past. Why, then, is an entire section of this book — this user's guide — devoted to the (seemingly arcane) history of American Studies? We have four interconnected reasons. Two of these we'll discuss quickly, the third we'll develop into an extended example of how to navigate and utilize past scholarship. We'll circle back to the fourth (and most controversial) reason at the end of the chapter.

First, and at the simplest level, nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. Knowing the history of your field reduces the risk of wasting time writing something that's already been written. This is harder than it looks. Even if you spent your entire life doing nothing but reading books in American Studies, you'd only have time to read a fraction of a percent of what has been published. As of 2017, the OCLC WorldCat catalog of university libraries listed 66,312 entries for the keyword "American Studies." Books with the exact title of American Studies — no subtitle — have been written by Tremaine McDowell (1948), Harry Stessel (1975), Mark Merlis (1994), Louis Menand (2002), and Jim Dow (2011), not to mention journals of that title published by the Midcontinent American Studies Association, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, the Institute of Social Sciences in Beijing, the German Association for American Studies, Seoul National University, and the University of Warsaw. You do, of course, have to weed out things like American Studies in Papyrology (a monograph series published by the American Society of Papyrologists) that aren't really relevant to the field. But you're still left with a lot of texts. And weeding out false hits is not easy. One might imagine, for example, an ethnographic study of papyrologists who live in the United States but devote their lives to studying ancient texts from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Such a project would fall squarely within the boundaries of American Studies, and it might eventually lead you to American Studies in Papyrology.

This hypothetical is not as far-fetched as it sounds — some of the earliest college and university programs in American Studies offered classes in things like forestry and botany, in addition to anthropology, economics, sociology, history, literature, music, and more. Anything related to American culture was fair game. On the other hand, students do not have unlimited room in their schedules, which meant the field was shaped, from the start, by struggles over what — and how — students should read. Some believed the purpose of American Studies was to encourage appreciation for democracy, free enterprise, and, at the University of Wyoming, "the American way" Others wanted to foster critical thinking about topics like nationalism, militarism, and capitalism, especially when the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed to be looming over American culture like a storm cloud. Over time, these differences morphed into struggles over whether students should focus on a small "canon" of American writers and artists (mostly white men, and many from a single decade — the 1850s), or whether offering classes in American Studies should mean building the curriculum around texts by and about women, immigrants, sailors, slaves, and other marginalized groups.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. There is a second reason to linger on the past of American Studies, and it has to do with method. Scholars in all fields, when embarking on a research project, are expected to identify their method or methods. History matters here, too, because it offers models for how scholars in the past have gone about their work. Imagine, for example, that you are a junior scientist applying for grant money to study lung cancer. You'll need to be able to answer some basic questions about your methods: How will you conduct the research? Why is your lab the best place to carry it out? And, perhaps most important: How does your study relate to past efforts to understand the disease? It might seem obvious that such research is a worthy cause — nobody in their right mind would oppose curing cancer — but the organization giving you money needs to know if your proposed research is credible. One way that credibility is established is by demonstrating your familiarity with the methods and findings of previous studies. This step is not merely opportunistic and individual; careful articulations of method help to build trust for a body of scholarship as a whole.

A third reason: you need to be able to explain the significance — the "so what?" — of your work by connecting it to a larger conversation. Some of your explanation will revolve around understanding, explaining, and applying methods. But another way to establish the "so what?" of your work is to situate it in relation to the historiography or genealogy of your field. These might be unfamiliar terms, so let's linger on them for a moment. Historiography is based on the Greek roots "historia" (narrative, history) and "graphia" (writing). Genealogy is based on the Greek root "genos" (gene, offspring, race) together with the suffix "-logy" (study of), which comes from the Greek "logos" (word).

Historiography = "historia" (history) + "graphia" (writing) = writing about history

Genealogy = "genos" (gene) + "-logy" (study of) = the study of genetic origins

We will get to genealogy a little later, but let's start with historiography. Like "method" and "methodology," it is easy to get "history" and "historiography" mixed up. These are not synonyms. History, as James Harvey Robinson put it in 1912, is "the vague and comprehensive science of past human affairs." It includes everything that has happened in the past, all the way down to "this morning's newspaper." Historiography, by contrast, refers to the study of what people have written about history.

In American Studies, historiography refers to the history of scholarship in the field of American Studies. But it is more than just a matter of surveying individual texts; the key is figuring out how they come together to create scholarly conversations, and...