12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A view of the relationship between history and historian, May 8, 2002
This review is from: Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (Hardcover)
What constitutes history and how it should be told has become an increasingly significant question over the years. How events are portrayed in history texts often is more the result of the social climate at the time or the purpose of the writer than actual fact.
Part of the problem with history is that as new facts are discovered and new perspectives proposed history is rewritten. Different groups offer a different perspective to the traditional perspective. So, we now have black history, women's history, etc. However, these same historians must deal with a fickle public whose primary interest in history has traditionally been that it be told with a particular purpose in mind. When the Constitution states that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness we are taught that it means literally everyone. However, history has at times excluded American Indians, Black Americans and others. Particular areas of the United States have excluded the Irish, the Catholic, the Polish, the Japanese or any number of other groups.
This book contains nine essays by Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, that were prepared for various conferences and book introductions. In these essays Foner examines how the historian interacts with the history and their surroundings and how that interaction determines their perspective on history. It includes essay on Mr. Foner's personal life as a historian and the things that influence his perspective. Others include essays on modern Russia and post-apartheid South Africa and how they are rethinking their past in view of the current changes. Probably the most interesting essays are in Mr. Foner's area of specialization - slavery, the Civil War and post-Reconstruction America.
An especially interesting read for those who are not familiar with the controversies of traditional history, it is a good read, logically argued and recommended for early college level students or higher. For most of the essays the writing is slightly above the level of the average high school student.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
History - facts and their "interpretation" (4.25*s), August 10, 2003
There may be those who simplistically view history as no more than gathering and presenting "facts" about the past, but noted historian Eric Foner would respond that history involves the interpretation of facts and is subject to change. But history is not pure subjectivity; historical truth is a "reasonable approximation of the past." Despite the title of the book, the author does not directly address the issue of "ownership" of history. There is the question of who produces history. Is history mainly produced by academic historians, which slowly filters into the public's consciousness? Or is historical understanding dominated by large institutions such as the mass media, think tanks, and the education industry, many of whom are inclined to promote an historical agenda? The author acknowledges that "for years historians have been aware that historical traditions are invented and manipulated. In addition, "forgetting some aspects of the past is as much a part of historical understanding as remembering others." This may be due simply to ignorance or poor scholarship. Or more disturbingly, historical distortion may be a sinister effort by various social and economic elites to dominate and manipulate social understandings.
The United States is a nation founded on the ideals of liberty, political equality and democracy. We are not a traditional society where unquestioned myths passed down from generation to generation are the glue of society. Openness and informed debate about all matters, including those historical, are essential in a society based on rational decision making. Not understanding our principles, how we have lived up to them, and where we need to go is not an option. Yet, it is clear that the injection of bogus historical views into our national understandings has plagued our society in the past and continues to do so today.
Three essays deal with the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. A determined Southern elite and a complicit Supreme Court essentially negated the citizenship rights that blacks had achieved in landmark legislation after the Civil War. But that history is often buried or distorted. Prominent Northern historians of the times validated the Jim Crow era by suggesting that blacks lacked the capacity for self-government. The focus on nationalism, or the right of white Anglo-Saxon America to become an imperial power at the end of the 19th century, further obscured the suppression of rights for some American citizens.
It is this decades-long willful amnesia of the Reconstruction era that has permitted the Supreme Court in the modern era to see unfairness in racial preferences while ignoring the history of racial injustice. Conveniently, judicial decisions are now supposedly rendered on the basis of "original intent" or "strict construction." However, the author notes that the language of the Fourteenth Amendment was purposely "broad and indeterminate" to give maximum leeway to the judiciary in the implementation of the amendment. The narrow legal judgments of today in this area actually ignore original intent in their rush to yield to political exigencies.
In one of these essays, the author critically examines Ken Burns' nine-part PBS series on the Civil War. The author finds that "Burns recapitulates the very historical understanding of the war `invented' in the 1890s as part of the glorification of the national state and the nationwide triumph of white supremacy." For Burns the Civil War was a "family quarrel among whites, whose fundamental accomplishment was the preservation of the Union." The abolition of slavery is scarcely mentioned, not to mention the failure of Reconstruction to secure civil rights for former slaves. In the final segment Burns focuses on the friendly reunion in 1913 of white veterans of Gettysburg. In a devastating comment, the author notes that in that same year President Wilson segregated federal office buildings in Washington D.C. As the author says, "Accurately remembered, the events of Reconstruction place the issue of racial justice on the agenda of modern life - but not if the history of that era and the costs paid on the road to reunion are ignored, misrepresented, or wished away."
In another essay, the author examines the impact that globalization is having on the definition of the long-cherished American ideal of freedom. Transnational institutions and corporations through their think tanks and control of the media have redefined freedom as participation in a global free-marketplace. Gone are the "elements of freedom such as self-government, economic autonomy, and social justice" that were a part of the republican tradition in America. Strong national governments attempting to regulate economic matters are portrayed as impediments in a global economy. The author admits that freedom is constantly subject to redefinition, but freedom defined as merely competing in global production ignores American traditions of freedom. It may not be an overstatement to contend that "the relationship between globalization and freedom may be the most pressing political and social problem of the 21st century."
In other interesting essays, the career of historian Richard Hofstadter is examined and the oft-asked question concerning the absence of socialism in American is reviewed. Hofstadter gets tagged as a "consensus" historian because he noted that the "virtues of individual liberty, private property, and capitalist enterprise" were broadly agreed upon by most Americans. The author notes that Hofstadter did not celebrate this uniformity, finding it to be a "form of intellectual and political bankruptcy," which echoes the findings of Tocqueville one hundred years earlier. Yet consensus theories do have resiliency. The absence of class-based activism and turns to socialism are partly answered by the existence in varying degrees of republicanism or "producerism," the absorption or cooptation of protest, the substitution of consumption as empowerment, the divisions and stratifications of the working class, and winner-take-all elections.
Clearly the concept of history is hardly as straightforward as may be thought at first glance. "Who Owns History?" is an excellent attempt at getting a handle on historical interpretation and the ramifications thereof.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gritty and compelling set of essays, January 1, 2003
This review is from: Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (Hardcover)
Foner is not one to beat around the bush. He tackles pressing social and political issues head on. In this remarkable collection of essays, he has taken aim at several key issues which define contemporary society. The most compelling essay is probably "Blacks and the U.S. Constitution," in which he examines the motivations behind the conservative desire to read the Constitution in terms of its "original intent."
As Foner notes, this is more a political than a historical argument. By narrowing the interpretation of the Constitution to its "original intent," conservatives hope to avoid addressing the more thorny issues which the later amendments attempt to address. He views the current decisions by the Supreme Court as part of an overall drive toward "Redemption," similar to the period of readjustment, in which states nullified much of the Civil Rights legislation which was enacted by the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. This eventually led to the notorious era of Jim Crow.
Foner views history as a continuum, not a set of isolated events, which can be referred to to bolster one's political arguments, whether they be conservative or liberal. Like his mentor, Richard Hofstadter, Foner rebels against consensus opinion, asking readers to form minds of their own. The essays are gritty and compelling and serve as a reminder of the intellectual prowess of one of the foremost historians of our time.
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