New Ways in History, 1966–2006

Prologue: January 2006

I first encountered Geoff Eley's A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society, a survey of long-term disciplinary trends that is a major focus of this essay, while standing in Shaman Drum, a wonderful independent bookstore near the University of Michigan's campus in Ann Arbor.¹ During previous trips to that town, I had heard the store praised but not gotten a chance to visit it. So going to Shaman Drum seemed a natural thing to do when I was back there early in 2006 to give a talk. As an admirer of Eley's work, when I saw his then-brand-new book on display in the store, it was equally natural to pick it up and start reading. I was hooked instantly. I finished the first chapter, 'Becoming a Historian: a Personal Preface', before leaving the store, and read much of the rest of it in my hotel room that night.

It seems especially fitting that the copy of A Crooked Line I have before me as I write was bought in Ann Arbor. That is where Eley lives and works, and where the lectures that form the basis of A Crooked Line were delivered. And one of his arguments in the book, easily his most personal to date, is that historians are influenced by the settings in which they operate. In addition, one of the most striking vignettes in A Crooked Line looks back to a 1979 conference in Ann Arbor with early manifestations of the emerging fissures in what had previously seemed a relatively unified camp. This camp was made up of scholars who shared a commitment to interdisciplinarity and to taking seriously the histories, actions and agency of non-elite groups. The divide Eley depicts developing in 1979 was between those who embraced the 'linguistic turn', such as William Sewell, and those who viewed this turn with suspicion, such as Charles Tilly.

Within a day of returning home from Ann Arbor, I finished A Crooked Line, and immediately upon completing its bracing final section, 'Defiance: History in the Present Tense', I sat down to write a response. The result was not this essay, however. Stimulating as I found the book, I could not think of an approach to take, or even a way to begin. So, I gave up on the idea – for a time.

Only after putting the book aside for a few months, and then having an experience that inspired me to reread it (this time in tandem with a very different sort of look at disciplinary trends, edited by David Cannadine) did I begin this essay. But just as it was fitting that I bought A Crooked Line in Ann Arbor – and in a bookstore that Eley would single out a few months later for its effort to highlight the 'relationship between what we do in the university and the circulation of ideas in the society outside' – there is something fitting about the roundabout writing process through which I have tried to come to terms with his important book.² Eley's title is taken from a statement by Bertolt Brecht: 'When there are obstacles, the shortest distance between two points is a crooked line'. And my path to this essay was anything but straight.³

The journey to a second effort, this time completed, to write about A Crooked Line began with my late-spring 2006 preparations for a move across country from Indiana University to the University of California-Irvine. I was digging through a giant desktop pile of journal photocopies and other papers that I had accumulated in the course of my fifteen years at IU, trying to decide which to mail out west and which just to recycle, when I came across what I refer to as my 'TLS Time Capsule'. It took the form of eight articles that had appeared in New Ways in History, a 1966 special issue of the Times Literary Supplement devoted almost exclusively to commentaries on the discipline. Judging from the geological stratum in which I found them, these articles had...