The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (review)

The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. By Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (New York, Columbia University Press, 1998) 291 pp. $27.50.

Finally! After years of sweeping but ill-informed pronouncements from pundits and scholars alike about Americans' historical consciousness (or lack thereof), Rosenzweig and Thelen decided to ask people directly. Using unusually open-ended and probing survey techniques, they polled a national sample and three minority cohorts. As ever, questions shaped answers. After a preliminary survey revealed that Americans made sharp distinctions between "history" (school-based and usually boring analyses of the activities of famous people) and "the past" (seen as embracing their own and their family's stories), the authors decided to ask about the latter, not the former.

Respondents revealed an intense interest and expertise in what the authors call "popular historymaking": Americans love to trace genealogies, attend reunions, make family scrapbooks, reminisce at Thanksgiving, and collect old things (cars, stamps, antiques). When asked, moreover, to choose which past was most important to them--familial, regional, ethnic, or national--they voted overwhelmingly for the most intimate trajectory, displaying little interest in linking their private narratives to larger public ones. Yet, there were exceptions. In the book's most striking finding, minority respondents cast far wider nets in their search for meaning, especially African-Americans, who saw their family stories as part of a larger race-based saga running from slavery and Civil War to segregation and Civil Rights. Evangelical Christians, too, inserted their personal mini-dramas into a Biblical epic running from Creation to Last Judgment.

When it came to analyzing their data, the authors diverged, offering independent chapters and contradictory afterwords. Rosenzweig's approach seems the more compelling. He is not surprised by the widespread popular interest in the past. Humans naturally seek to gain their temporal bearings. What concerns him is how readily many Americans settle for a parochial and privatized understanding of past/present relations, and thus underestimate the impact of larger structures of power on their own lives. The startlingly different black response, however, leads Rosenzweig to posit that variations in historical consciousness must themselves be understood historically. He wonders whether narrower white responses are a function of not having experienced the collective empowerment of the Civil Rights movement; or a legacy of Vietnam-era disaffection from big government and nationalism; or a result of mobility-generated disconnection from the local, regional, labor, and ethnic matrices that once made larger histories seem more powerful resources for making sense of the present. (Although testing such hypotheses over time would be difficult, they might be explored comparatively, through surveys of, say, contemporary Irish, Israeli, or Balkan attitudes toward the past. It might be worth examining whether the more comfortable people are with the status quo, the less inclined they are to scrutinize how their world came to be. Perhaps asking bigger questions is a function of a greater need to know.)

Thelen's contribution, by contrast, seems muzzy, rambling, and repetitive--perhaps the result of an unwillingness to confront certain implications of the survey material. He seems as astonished by the discovery that "using the past is as natural a part of life as eating or breathing" as was Moliere's bourgeois gentleman by the discovery that he had been speaking prose all those years. He expresses the giddily optimistic conviction that the "participatory historical culture" that he believes common to Americans can bring them together in dialogue and respect.

Thelen also blurs the line between popular and professional history makers, suggesting that those who recorded "whether their weight was going down or their grades were going up" were engaged in essentially the same enterprise as those constructing textbook accounts or museum displays of large scale social change over time. He finesses the way contending interests in the present can hew to conflicting narratives of the...