It's already Spring in Connecticut
04/02/2010 11:08
I went to UConn yesterday and met Christopher Clark. He let me tell him about my project for over ninety minutes, and even bought me a cup of coffee. I am extremely grateful and his comments and questions were a huge help.
I see my project and the rural history I want to do as being at least partly in the "lineage" of the type of work people like Professor Clark have done. In the introduction to Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War, Clark says “Since the emergence of the ‘new social history’ in the 1960s there has been a massive outpouring of scholarship on...the complexities of class, race, and gender...Because these subjects involve studying human interactions in specific contexts, much social history has been conducted at the local level, using particular places, instances, or regions to illustrate broader historical tendencies.” (ix)
Notwithstanding this description and several detailed, nuanced and qualified books I’ve read this semester, many works including some of the new social history place studies seem to follow preexisting theoretical models. It’s always hard to determine whether the scholarship behind them was organized around a preexisting system, or whether the findings led there and the book was just written to seem like it was inevitable. But it’s at least possible to observe that many of these place studies lack human subjects. I think this is due both to the complexity of the demographic and economic material being presented, and maybe also to the historian’s underlying hope to show the outlines of a structure comparable to the grand explanatory schemes of earlier historical subdisciplines. Professor Clark, who had been discussing Nature’s Metropolis in a seminar just before we met, said that one student’s reaction to the book was initial dismay when Cronon announced in the introduction that there were no people in the book, but ultimately appreciation for the way Cronon managed to tell several fast-paced, conflict-laden stories, even though he didn’t use the particulars of individual characters’ lives (Note to self: It’s probably worth looking closely again at NM as an example of how to do narrative on generic or inanimate subjects). But not all authors manage this as successfully, and the end result is often a set stage waiting for actors.
Professor Clark makes two points at the beginning of Social Change I thought were relevant to my project. First, he says, “regional social differences are at the heart of...national developments. These differences were not variations or exceptions to general trends; rather, their interactions were the essence of social change.” Second, “the inequalities of status between individuals within households played almost as significant a role in driving social change as conflicts...between social groups.” (xi)
These are both really interesting statements, from my “rural history” point of view. The first one blows away the top-down structure of historical theory I complained about a couple of paragraphs ago. This is a break from the older historical approach of fitting local data into “big” models like central place theory -- and feeling obligated to leave the stories of individuals out because they introduce too many messy, local, contingent irregularities. It elevates the local, particular, contingent stories of actual people. It's not even "history from the bottom up" -- up being where the big theory and credibility presumably lie. He's saying "this is where history really happens."
The second statement seems to imply that the family is a both a microcosm and a model for society in the 18th and 19th centuries. That people experienced conflicts of interest, power relationships, and resistance inside families that colored their understanding of the social landscape. Is he saying class consciousness is based on family and household relationships? Where does he find this? (I put the library copy aside and ordered the book, so when it arrives I’ll find out) Regional particularities could be expected to play a huge role in these different visions of society. Not only in terms of dependence/unfreedom vs. independence/freedom, but in more subtle shadings of agency, responsibility, scope of social action, etc.
I wonder if doing a national-scope book like Social Change makes it harder to address these narrower questions? It requires you to spend a lot of (most of? all of?) your time talking about the north-south issue. Slavery is so huge, and the issues so stark, that it might not be possible to get at the more subtle issues that influenced other elements of the different social visions that differentiated the middle west from New England or the arid west from the Ohio Valley. Does examining slavery hide some of these other regional issues? Did it at the time?
I went ahead and ordered a copy of Social Change, so I can read it more closely (that is, write in it) and include it on my field list. I’ll going to come back to this, once I’ve done that.
I see my project and the rural history I want to do as being at least partly in the "lineage" of the type of work people like Professor Clark have done. In the introduction to Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War, Clark says “Since the emergence of the ‘new social history’ in the 1960s there has been a massive outpouring of scholarship on...the complexities of class, race, and gender...Because these subjects involve studying human interactions in specific contexts, much social history has been conducted at the local level, using particular places, instances, or regions to illustrate broader historical tendencies.” (ix)
Notwithstanding this description and several detailed, nuanced and qualified books I’ve read this semester, many works including some of the new social history place studies seem to follow preexisting theoretical models. It’s always hard to determine whether the scholarship behind them was organized around a preexisting system, or whether the findings led there and the book was just written to seem like it was inevitable. But it’s at least possible to observe that many of these place studies lack human subjects. I think this is due both to the complexity of the demographic and economic material being presented, and maybe also to the historian’s underlying hope to show the outlines of a structure comparable to the grand explanatory schemes of earlier historical subdisciplines. Professor Clark, who had been discussing Nature’s Metropolis in a seminar just before we met, said that one student’s reaction to the book was initial dismay when Cronon announced in the introduction that there were no people in the book, but ultimately appreciation for the way Cronon managed to tell several fast-paced, conflict-laden stories, even though he didn’t use the particulars of individual characters’ lives (Note to self: It’s probably worth looking closely again at NM as an example of how to do narrative on generic or inanimate subjects). But not all authors manage this as successfully, and the end result is often a set stage waiting for actors.
Professor Clark makes two points at the beginning of Social Change I thought were relevant to my project. First, he says, “regional social differences are at the heart of...national developments. These differences were not variations or exceptions to general trends; rather, their interactions were the essence of social change.” Second, “the inequalities of status between individuals within households played almost as significant a role in driving social change as conflicts...between social groups.” (xi)
These are both really interesting statements, from my “rural history” point of view. The first one blows away the top-down structure of historical theory I complained about a couple of paragraphs ago. This is a break from the older historical approach of fitting local data into “big” models like central place theory -- and feeling obligated to leave the stories of individuals out because they introduce too many messy, local, contingent irregularities. It elevates the local, particular, contingent stories of actual people. It's not even "history from the bottom up" -- up being where the big theory and credibility presumably lie. He's saying "this is where history really happens."
The second statement seems to imply that the family is a both a microcosm and a model for society in the 18th and 19th centuries. That people experienced conflicts of interest, power relationships, and resistance inside families that colored their understanding of the social landscape. Is he saying class consciousness is based on family and household relationships? Where does he find this? (I put the library copy aside and ordered the book, so when it arrives I’ll find out) Regional particularities could be expected to play a huge role in these different visions of society. Not only in terms of dependence/unfreedom vs. independence/freedom, but in more subtle shadings of agency, responsibility, scope of social action, etc.
I wonder if doing a national-scope book like Social Change makes it harder to address these narrower questions? It requires you to spend a lot of (most of? all of?) your time talking about the north-south issue. Slavery is so huge, and the issues so stark, that it might not be possible to get at the more subtle issues that influenced other elements of the different social visions that differentiated the middle west from New England or the arid west from the Ohio Valley. Does examining slavery hide some of these other regional issues? Did it at the time?
I went ahead and ordered a copy of Social Change, so I can read it more closely (that is, write in it) and include it on my field list. I’ll going to come back to this, once I’ve done that.
