"Baltimore's Hard Histories" Kick-Off Conversation
Bouie, Ifill, and Naeem on how studying the past gets us to a better future
A lot of Americans are just out of the habit of thinking expansively about what their country could be," he said. "Trying to see through the eyes of someone in the early 19th century who did have an expansive vision … is practice for us to do it ourselves. - Jamelle Bouie
“Baltimore’s Hard Histories” kicked-off last Thursday evening in a discussion that featured New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, and Baltimore Museum of Art director Asma Naeem. Speaking primarily to a gathering of Hard Histories practitioners, the three explained their own journeys to studying the past, the necessity of critical self-examination, and how new histories can be subject to backlash.
There is nothing self-evidently praiseworthy when it comes to writing histories that aim to explain the present and even shape the future. Just take a look here at an essay from then-American Historical Association President Jim Sweet — “Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present” — to get a sense of how even today the charge of presentism can be wielded against historians, in this example especially those who study the Black past. Sweet later apologized for the “damage” his essay caused, and the debates it generated are on-going.
Still, hard history practitioners can find affirmation of their approaches — and of the call for history to indeed be useful — in the example of marriage equality, a case in which historians worked closely and to great effect alongside litigants and their advocates to illuminate the past of marriage in the U.S. — it has been a greatly changing institution over time, they explained — to support the view that marriage might yet change again to permit same-sex unions to be recognized by law. Looking back over those years, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich concluded: “History cannot tell us how to act in the present, but it can remind us of the ongoing struggle, even today, to reconcile the claims of liberty and justice.”1
Beginning our “Baltimore’s Hard Histories” conference with Bouie, Ifill, and Naeem, also reminds us that interpretation of the past does not happen only in academic settings or on the pages of scholarly books and articles. On the pages of the New York Times, on the wall of the Baltimore Museum of Art, and in the briefs of attorneys like those at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, we also find history being written and to powerful effect.
Among our community of Hard History practitioners are historians, and also curators, archivists, students, public historians, archaeologists, public health scholars, librarians, civic leaders, educators, descendants, community activists, journalists, and more. Our shared commitment is to a rigorous investigation of the past, to critical self-examination, and to frank and on-going interpretation bind us together. We are all engaged in new story telling that is changing our institutions and the communities of which they are a part.
You can read more about this keynote conversation here, courtesy of JHU’s The Hub: “Studying the Past Can Help Shape a Better Future, Panelists Say.”
— MSJ
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Afteword: Useful History,” Gender and History 29, no. 3 (November 2017): 732-41.
This is a good statement of goals and also a great reminder that there are plenty of people who are not professional historians uncovering important events and ideas in our past. Also, I haven’t read the Sweet speech, so I’ll do that!