Forum: Reflections on Radical History
Long Live Radical History!
Ellen Carol DuBois
I am quite comfortable with the term "radical history" to describe what I do. It captures the period--the late sixties--in which I undertook this vocation and the social forces that shaped my understanding of my society and my work in it. The term says less about ideology than it does about passion for social change and critical distance from the centers of power. It also captures what about those years made me and so many others into historians. History doesn't always move at the same rate. For our students, history has moved so slowly that they must have great imagination to believe that it moves at all. But in my formative years, change occurred very quickly indeed, and this is what gave me the twin convictions that made me into a radical historian: (1) social, political, cultural, and economic conditions are ALWAYS changing; but (2) the nature of that change is rarely predictable and never consistent. This belief is what connects my history-writing to my history-making and allows me to endure as a citizen-participant: Sooner or later things will change and if you can just hang in there and live long enough, eventually they'll change in your direction. There have been times when my faith in the inevitability of historical change has been sorely tried--just about two-thirds through the Reagan/Bush era, I'd say--but what has happened since has certainly vindicated my conviction. Who could have possibly predicted the current revival of the American labor movement, for instance, with women and immigrants at its core? [End Page 91]
Come to think of it, what distinguishes "radical history" for me from other sorts of subversive intellectual and academic postures is the degree to which it incorporates a commitment to remain active and engaged in historical change in the present, the discouraging nature of any particular period notwithstanding. The great gift of our profession, if we choose to take it, is having the long view, knowing that "it" has happened before, will happen again, and is always different.
Perhaps the most fundamental and certainly the most enduring element of the radical history perspective is the notion of "agency." Whatever other conceptions younger historians bring to their work now, whatever influence for instance the "linguistic turn" and "cultural studies" has on them, they hold on to the idea of "agency" that my generation introduced into historical writing. They understand that human beings are always making their own history, regardless of their place in the social and economic hierarchy of their day. Perhaps it is even time to reexamine the concept of "agency." Students tend to use it as a slogan. The notion of historical agency may need itself to be placed into history, treated historiographically, kept lively. Maybe someone out there could undertake a genealogy of the concept: Who first used it? How did it develop and how has it changed? To what degree do methodologies of the 1980s and '90s about the constraints of cultural formations conflict with the idea of "agency"? Where are these conflicts being addressed and how resolved?
When thinking about what my generation of American historians has actually done, I am heartened. The substance of and approach to American history is so dramatically different from the unreflective, top-down, soporific national history that people my age were raised on that almost nothing of the old ways is left. And I mean this to describe not just what happens in the classroom and in our own journals and conferences, but in the world of public history, which is more vital and popular than I ever imagined it would be. Historical museum exhibits and documentary film projects are proliferating and provocative. The controversies that they have stirred up are all to the good. Who could have imagined, two decades ago, that the presentation of American history could be a political hot potato, a subject of impassioned national debate, something that really mattered and was really contested? Living as I do in Los Angeles, I'd like to see this process continue so that even commercial movies and television create more space for historical thinking, and not just about the cut of the costume either. I also hope that historians who work in popular venues will concentrate on teaching the public that responsible historical thinking requires interpretive variety and debate. The radical approach to the substance of history--who counts, as it were--has basically carried the day. The radical approach to the method of history--that the meaning of the past is constantly and necessarily changing--is the next thing to get across.
In this one area, understanding history, perhaps the sixties has really triumphed: radical history rules! Long live radical history!
Ellen Carol DuBois is professor of history and director of the graduate program for women's studies at UCLA. Her most recent books are Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (Yale) and Woman Suffrage, Women's Rights (New York University Press). The anthology she edits with Vicki Ruiz, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (Routledge) is now out in its new revised third edition.
