Barbara Fields On What It Takes To Be a Historian
The essay below titled, “So You Want To Be a Historian,” is authored by historian Barbara Fields and appeared in The Washington Post in 1991. I only learned about it yesterday as a result of seeing it on my social media feeds. So much of this resonates with me as a historian, but also as a history educator, and as a student of history. I don’t typically share other people’s writing in its entirety on my own site, but I am going to make an exception here. I am a huge fan of Fields’s scholarship and this essay is well worth reading and even re-reading.
The comments section below is open to everyone, so feel free to share your thoughts.
ARE YOU sure?
Are you curious enough about your fellow human beings, and convinced enough of their worth to want to spend your life trying to figure out the things they do and say and think? Curious enough to remain interested even when, perhaps especially when, what they think appalls you, what they do makes you angry, and what they say makes you want to wash their mouths out with soap? Curious enough to remain angry until you find out whether your anger is justified, convinced enough of their worth to keep probing even after you are satisfied that your anger is justified? And if you are as curious as that about your fellow human beings, as convinced as that of their worth, are you prepared to spend hours at a time shut away from them, isolated in the library or archives or alone with your typewriter or computer?
Who are your fellow human beings anyway? Which of them do you feel obligated to respect? Which do you judge entitled to justice? The ones who share your nationality or speak your language or look like people you know? The ones whose religion—or lack of religion—is the same as yours? The ones the same color as you or the same social class? The ones who stand for progress as you define it? The ones others have identified as great men and women? The ones you consider to be great men and women?
As for which human beings deserve respect and justice: If you want to be a historian, you must rate all alike as entitled to respect and justice. Not because they are good, not because they are smart, not because they are talented, not because they are wise, not because you would necessarily like them if you ever came face to face, but just because they are human. My parents used to say, when someone in the family did something outrageous, "You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives." As a historian, you will never enjoy the luxury of writing only about your friends. For better or worse, you will have to write about your relatives. A song that was popular when I was in college included the line: "I don't care if you don't want me; I'm yours." Descendants of Confederate soldiers, flying the Confederate flag: The abolitionists and slaves and the Yankee army are yours, whether you want them or not. Descendants of abolitionists and slaves and Union soldiers: The Confederates are yours, whether you want them or not.
And speaking of flags, do you understand that, as a historian, you cannot salute, let alone worship, a flag—not the American flag, not the black nationalist flag, not the flag of the West or the flag of the rest? There are places you can go wearing jeans, chewing gum, and speaking in four-letter expletives; there are other places where you must dress formally and conduct yourself with decorum. By the same token, there are places you can go flying and saluting flags and other places where flags do not belong. Flags have a way of flapping in the wind. Sometimes they get in your face, obscuring your vision, and sometimes they come between you and the light. Nations and armies have flags and in your private and lay capacity, you may owe loyalty to them. But humanity has no flag. And it is to humanity, not to one subdivision of it, that you owe your loyalty in your capacity as a historian.
How much self-discipline do you have? I am not just talking about the kind that makes you sit indoors reading when the weather invites you out or even the kind that makes you keep your notes in order and carefully record the source of every stray piece of information you think you may one day use—though surely you need that kind of self-discipline. I am also talking about the kind that makes you report scrupulously an argument you disagree with; the kind that stiffens your backbone to turn six months of research and a desk-high stack of computer output into a single paragraph or even a single sentence, if that is all the space the conclusion deserves; the kind that compels you to abandon a pet notion that, after you have spent months trying to prove it, turns out to be wrong.
Do you like to read—not just history books but all kinds of things? Literature, certainly, because good literature does what good history ought to: helps us imagine the lies and thoughts of strangers, while never forgetting that they are, in fact, strangers. The most dangerous lie in any work of history is the use of the word we to refer to people of the past. The people of the past are not we to us, but they: strangers, no matter how close we feel to them. You must like to read, furthermore, not just to retrieve information, but for love of language and for admiration of people who know how to use it elegantly and effectively. All kinds of reading may teach you to be a better historian. Mystery writers turn complex plots into stories readers can follow. Novelists sometimes have to tell a story where there is no clear plot. Read newspapers. One lesson they teach you—a vital lesson—is not to believe everything you read. But newspapers, especially from other countries and in other languages, open windows into worlds bigger than your own; and if you know no world but your own, you do not know your own as well as you should, just as you do not know your own language as well as you should if you know no language except your own.
DO YOU LIKE to write? I mean really like to write—so that you put the same enthusiasm into draft number five or number 11 that you do into draft number one? Because, while draft number one may make perfect sense to you, you have not finished your job until you have produced a draft that makes sense to your Aunt Fanny, who is not a scholar but an intelligent person who wants to understand. Historians do not write about interstellar space or subatomic particles. We write about human beings and human actions, which should make sense to an audience of human beings who are intelligent and educated and willing to put forth a reasonable effort. If Aunt Fanny cannot understand what you wrote, the chances are you have not understood either, even if you have mastered the highfalutin jargon in which professional historians learn to camouflage what they do not fully understand.
If you want to be a historian, there must be things that matter enough for you to get angry about them; and those same things must matter enough for you to discipline your anger to the task of understanding for yourself and explaining to others. Whatever those things are, they must be more important to you than everything else, with one exception: your integrity. Nothing must matter more to you than your integrity; that is, your courage and determination to tell the truth as far as you can determine it; to risk being wrong sometimes, in good faith, and ready to admit error; to acknowledge generously what you owe to others; to think through carefully everything you write, and then accept responsibility for it. If anything matters more to you that your own integrity, if a fancy job with a fancy salary matters more, if winning assent or approval from friends and peers matters more, if worming your way into the good graces of well-heeled alumni and other potential donors of money to your institution matters more; if getting your name on the op-ed page or your face on television matters more, if winning a prize or a prestigious fellowship matters more, if reaching the best-seller list of The Washington Post or the New York Times matters more, or if anything else matters more, you do not really want to be a historian.
THERE ARE about 75,000 working historians in the United States, and 23,000 of them hold PhDs. Many teach and do research in colleges and universities but by no means all. Historians work in government agencies, archives, state historical societies, foundations and museums and of course primary and secondary schools. After several years of a tight academic job market, the employment outlook for historians seems to be brightening.
As a young aspiring historian, this is one of the most inspiring pieces I've ever read; thank you. Love the part about reading a wide variety of books; I've found novels, poetry, or even academic papers on natural sciences to be some of the most compelling stimuli to catalyze my writing and research. And doing my best to withold personal judgement on a topic and instead allow the facts to take me where they may is something I constantly need to be reminded of. She seems to have a beautiful and elegant view of history as the study of humans, a persuit that requires a great deal of empathy.
I was not specifically aware of Barbara Fields to the extent that I could have identified her until I first saw her speak in videos here on Civil War Memory. Thank you—I have since gone looking for other videos, speeches, etc.
I appreciate the application of her words to aspiring historians, but I rather think that all of what she wrote here applies not just to those practicing the occupation of history, but to every human being, no matter what their occupation or affiliation. These statements, especially those I assume you highlighted, are much broader than that if we are to right our ship. They speak to the necessity of a self-awareness that applies to every one of us, regardless of occupation. "If you know no world but your own, you do not know your own as well as you should…"
In this respect, we must ALL be, at least, amateur historians in our own vocations.
As a former psychotherapist, it became clear to me that the past events of one client's life—and their conclusions about the "why" they happened—must be probed repeatedly, the "accepted" memory visited and revisited anew, with the goal of guiding a patient to a realization that the self-esteem-destroying notions they've carried about their own value as humans cannot be "true," and abandoned. My assumptions about what happened, how it affected them, were worthless. I could not know the source of their pain.
As a Southerner, the recognition that I did not "know" my ancestors long buried in Confederate cemeteries with their designated affiliations and what drove their joining a fight that could not have benefited them in any way, came early. One great-great-uncle died at Gettysburg and the uselessness of his death has never been lost on me. I can imagine that he simply didn't understand that he was the pawn of rich slaveholders with an agenda irrelevant to his prosperity and never battled with the idea that he was somehow better than the "other," but I have to also consider the possibility that he was an evil man who believed himself superior to every other human unlike himself. I can draw no conclusion, but I also know that although I carry some small portion of his DNA, I am responsible only for what I do now, today, recognizing how he got there.
In everyday life, we solve problems, approach tasks by first looking to the past, at what has been done before. But the result still comes down to "Nothing must matter more to you than your integrity…" because those who are pushing us toward fascism today are, in fact, learning from the past and learning well, with no willingness to "acknowledge generously what you owe to others" or are "ready to admit error."
She was a philosopher here, not just an historian.