A Requiem and Thanks

I say that I am fortunate not because I think lecturing is the best way to teach students. I am quite certain it is not. Nor do I consider myself lucky because the survey is a coveted slot. Many, perhaps most, of my colleagues hate the idea of teaching a course where various requirements corral students who would so obviously rather be somewhere else. I don’t mind this. The course is not going to do them any harm, and hostile audiences do me good. I do think the students hate the course, and history, less at the end of the quarter than at the beginning, but this slight achievement is not the source of my pleasure. As unlikely as it may seem, it is the intellectual pleasure of preparing the course that makes me feel fortunate.

I am particularly aware of this eccentric pleasure this year because this fall Larry Levine, Richard Leopold, and George Tindall all died. I knew Larry Levine, but not well, and I never met either Professors Leopold or Tindall. They all had remarkable careers, and I will leave it for others who knew them to memorialize them as they deserve to be memorialized. I knew them as people whose books I sometimes read carefully but more often, particularly in my twenties and thirties, read quickly, often late at night or early in the morning when children were quiet and I had pages of my own to fill before I stood in front of a class. Sometimes, particularly with Tindall, I read them desperately, fifteen minutes before class, trusting them to explain elegantly subjects about which I knew next to nothing and yet would very soon be explaining to people who knew even less.

These first sleep deprived years of our acquaintance were not intellectually pleasurable, but they were necessary. In those early lectures my students got inferior versions of Levine, Leopold, and Tindall, and many others. Their works were recognizable, but they had lost all nuance in my versions. I was gutting books, and the whole steaming mess went into the survey pot. It is no wonder the survey has seemed to many of my colleagues over the years a rendering down of the nuanced and complex into a stew of simplicities. There are still moments when I inwardly wince as I hear what I have just said. Over the course of time, however, pleasure replaced desperation.

Historians share with physicians a tendency to award specialists and demean generalists, but to teach the survey is to be a generalist. In the survey, I am an American historian, and not a historian of the West, or Indian peoples, or the environment. I teach, or have taught, politics, economics, and foreign relations and not the social and cultural history in which I was trained. And because of this I read things I otherwise would not have read, and what I read has to be related to what I have read in the past. Many of us read widely, but only in the survey does the eclectic reading of the year crowd in on me and force me to try to stitch together frameworks, narratives, and sets of stories that become, as far as my students are concerned, American history.

This annual ritual of rearranging narratives because I know things that I did not know before and because the changing world has changed my angle of vision is a daunting challenge. It has made me realize how collective our work as historians really is. Our careers are individual; most of us claim authorship. We worry, and rightly enough, about plagiarism, but plagiarism is site specific. In the undergraduate lecture, the author died sometime ago. In the survey, we borrow freely and rarely, if ever, say where a particular interpretation or story came from. An individual lecturer speaks of course, but it is ventriloquism, and sometimes it is hard to say who is the ventriloquist and who is the dummy.

Over the years in my lectures the work of Professors Levine, Leopold, and Tindall have gotten more and more rendered down and assimilated; I have combined them with the work of other historians whom they might despise. As each year brings new books and new thoughts, the process continues. It is not an accumulation. The lectures get no longer. Instead it is a rearrangement, and some years, a radical restructuring of much of what I already have. The lectures have changed dramatically from the years when the works of professors—and I carefully choose the honorific–Levine, Leopold, and Tindall were undigested, but their influences very much remain. They are dead and their friends and families will mourn and miss them, but when I open my folders, they are still there, still challenging me, helping me, and still open to new combinations and new readings. As I say, I am not sure who is the ventriloquist and who is the dummy. May they rest in peace, but in the years I have left in the survey, they will get no rest in my class. And I thank them for that.